Is there an i18n shell in windows that supports a large character set? Testing my application in windows results in some math characters not being rendered correctly. The Lucida font in cmd.exe and powershell do not have a wide enough selection.
Unicode UTF-8 would be the most preferable, followed by the other Unicode encodings.
I'm not sure if this is a problem in the font or the console itself but you could try installing the DejaVu Sans Mono font and see if that provides the necessary characters.
CMD.EXE supports it just fine; the issue is that it is doesn't allow a whole lot of other fonts by default and Lucida Console, usually the only TrueType font there, has no fonts defined in the font fallback chain. See http://www.siao2.com/2008/03/19/8323216.aspx and the screenshots I link to in the comments for that blog post.
You may want to see http://www.siao2.com/2006/10/19/842895.aspx on how to make more fonts appear amongst those you can choose as the main console font.
Also, make sure that your application really uses a Unicode codepage for its output - http://illegalargumentexception.blogspot.com/2009/04/i18n-unicode-at-windows-command-prompt.html probably explains the issue better than I could (or, at the very least, as well as I could).
I just found the ActiveState Tcl does a really good job with tkcon.
When starting tkcon.tcl, I just have to type:
encoding system utf-8 It works well and even has tab completion. Of course, it is a Tcl shell and not a system shell.
It seems to be able to find characters for all of the symbols I am currently using in the test suite for my application.
While working under Windows, I use the DejaVu Sans Mono font along with Console for getting better Unicode (UTF-8) support.
