To manually change the font of the console, first you have to know where the fonts reside:
To try one, enter:
$ setfont /path/to/lat9u-12.psfu.gz
To set a particular font upon startup, add something like the following line to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
$ /usr/bin/setfont /path/to/lat9u-10.psfu.gz
There's a neater way, however. Slackware has a tool called setconsolefont. For Debian, the tool cosole-setup exists. RedHat and Fedora have the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n where a line can be added such as:
SYSFONT="LatArCyrHeb-08.psfu.gz"