ibm-cp437.enc.gz etc.

Unfortunately that doesn't work :/

The "10x20" xterm console font seems to understand linedraw characters without further muckage. So

xterm -fn 10x20

Also simply appending -u8 (make the xterm understand Unicode-8) seems to work with any font having linedraw characters - e.g. Andale Mono, Lucida Console, Courier New..so use the "-fa" option for a TT font and do

xterm -fa "Andale Mono" -fs 12 -u8

-fs is font size in points, of course.

You need X > 4.2 to get an xterm that understands Xft. A modern Red Hat probably has it.

As for console fonts - I use the Neomagic framebuffer device on my laptop and have the sun12x22 console font compiled into the fbcon module. This has line draw capability under ISO-8859-1 without munging anything. The standard VGA font should as well.