UTF-8 not displaying correctly in terminal

Question

I'm installing Arch for the first time, and it's going fairly well but one thing that's still bugging me is that UTF-8 characters aren't displaying correctly in the terminal. I seem to be having exactly the same problem described in this thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=161330 Namely, midnight commander looks like this:
http://en.zimagez.com/miniature/test738.png
When it should look like this:
http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-04112013-012828pm.php
It displays correctly when I connect to it via SSH from my other machine, but not on the machine's own display. Using the setfont command to set the font to the same the one I am already using fixes it temporarily, but the characters are displayed incorrectly again after a reboot. I ran through all the help given in the thread I linked to but the problem is still happening.
Here's my vconsole.conf:
KEYMAP=uk
FONT=Lat2-Terminus16
FONT_MAP=8859-1_to_uni
locale.conf:
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
Output from command "locale -a":
C
en_GB.utf8
POSIX
Output from command "locale":
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
mkinitipio.conf:
# vim:set ft=sh
# MODULES
# The following modules are loaded before any boot hooks are
# run. Advanced users may wish to specify all system modules
# in this array. For instance:
# MODULES="piix ide_disk reiserfs"
MODULES="i2c_core"
# BINARIES
# This setting includes any additional binaries a given user may
# wish into the CPIO image. This is run last, so it may be used to
# override the actual binaries included by a given hook
# BINARIES are dependency parsed, so you may safely ignore libraries
BINARIES=""
# FILES
# This setting is similar to BINARIES above, however, files are added
# as-is and are not parsed in any way. This is useful for config files.
FILES=""
# HOOKS
# This is the most important setting in this file. The HOOKS control the
# modules and scripts added to the image, and what happens at boot time.
# Order is important, and it is recommended that you do not change the
# order in which HOOKS are added. Run 'mkinitcpio -H <hook name>' for
# help on a given hook.
# 'base' is _required_ unless you know precisely what you are doing.
# 'udev' is _required_ in order to automatically load modules
# 'filesystems' is _required_ unless you specify your fs modules in MODULES
# Examples:
## This setup specifies all modules in the MODULES setting above.
## No raid, lvm2, or encrypted root is needed.
# HOOKS="base"
## This setup will autodetect all modules for your system and should
## work as a sane default
# HOOKS="base udev autodetect block filesystems"
## This setup will generate a 'full' image which supports most systems.
## No autodetection is done.
# HOOKS="base udev block filesystems"
## This setup assembles a pata mdadm array with an encrypted root FS.
## Note: See 'mkinitcpio -H mdadm' for more information on raid devices.
# HOOKS="base udev block mdadm encrypt filesystems"
## This setup loads an lvm2 volume group on a usb device.
# HOOKS="base udev block lvm2 filesystems"
## NOTE: If you have /usr on a separate partition, you MUST include the
# usr, fsck and shutdown hooks.
HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems keyboard fsck consolefont"
# COMPRESSION
# Use this to compress the initramfs image. By default, gzip compression
# is used. Use 'cat' to create an uncompressed image.
#COMPRESSION="gzip"
#COMPRESSION="bzip2"
#COMPRESSION="lzma"
#COMPRESSION="xz"
#COMPRESSION="lzop"
# COMPRESSION_OPTIONS
# Additional options for the compressor
#COMPRESSION_OPTIONS=""
Any help would be much appreciated

Answer 1

I tried running "setfont ter-116b" but apparently I don't have that font installed. In any case, Lat2-Terminus16 it is the font recommended in the beginner's guide so I don't see why it shouldn't work. The font itself can't be the problem because if I run
setfont Lat2-Terminus16
then everything displays correctly. Therefore I can only guess that either the setfont command does something that doesn't happen in the boot process, or my current configuration means that something else overwrites the console map settings during boot. However, apart from using en_GB locale and UK keymap I've been following the beginner's guide to the letter, so I don't understand what the problem is. I only added the FONT_MAP setting to vconsole.conf to try to fix this issue but all the settings I've changed it to (including removing it completely as per the beginner's guide) don't seem to make any difference.
Last edited by Morgy (2013-09-14 09:26:54)