With the default console setup (I have not changed anything since
installing) and the default LANG=en_US.UTF-8 locale setting, running
gcc on the console (on a file with suitable errors) produces square
block glyphs where there are supposed to be quotes.

It is known that gcc goes to a fair amount of more or less pointless
effort to try to print Unicode quote characters; it appears that it is
doing so and generating Unicode characters which the console has no
glyph for.

(The characters in question have the UTF-8 representation 0xe2 0x80
0x98 and 0xe2 0x80 0x99, and when logging in remotely they do in fact
display as quote characters. Also, unsetting LANG or setting LANG=C
causes gcc to emit ASCII quote characters, so it's not a gcc problem.)

ISTM that either the default console font should have glyphs for these
characters or gcc should be taught not to send them when they aren't
available.

gcc is gcc 4:4.3.2-2; libc is libc6 2.7-18lenny2; the kernel is
"2.6.26-2-amd64".

Quoting David Holland (dholland+debian@eecs.harvard.edu):


Not sure that enough people are still really interested in console
handling enough...let's still try to figure things out..:-)...CC'ing
Anton Zinoviev might help.

Do you have console-setup installed? ("dpkg -s console-setup" will
tell you)

If so, what's the content of /etc/default/console-setup?

I suppose console-setup is not installed.  If a font of console-setup
does not support some character, the character is outputted as a
diamond, not as a square block.

I suppose most codesets of console-setup already support the quotes.
But since all fonts of console-setup support even more exotic characters
used by mc and the console web browsers (bullets, arrows, diamonds,
etc.) I think I'll have to look after the quotes and make sure all fonts
support them.

Anton Zinoviev