I guess it's best to wait for yorik joining the py3-side of FreeCAD, as he knows best how things in Arch and Draft should behave. In the meantime you can maybe create a bugreport for these unicode problems.
Maybe @sgrogan can update the build to use pivy 0.6.5a0. Also maybe someone (@triplus?) familiar with the version-stuff shown in the about-dialog can update this widget to also show the pivy version. The version of pivy wasn't always available this way so using something like this:
looo wrote: ↑Tue Oct 23, 2018 1:42 pm
Also maybe someone (@triplus?) familiar with the version-stuff shown in the about-dialog can update this widget to also show the pivy version.
I tend to avoid C++ as much as i can. Therefore Werner likely is your best bet. In addition i am not the biggest fan of lengthy FreeCAD info. In 99% of the cases such specific info is more or less spam. And in that 1% (where it could prove to be useful) you need an expert anyway. To make some sense of it. Like seen and demonstrated in this thread. And an expert usually knows on what to ask for. To get the needed info and to confirm the assumption.
I guess this means the pivy version is 0.6.4b1 as this is the only build available from conda-forge without the __version__. So maybe something went wrong during updating the pivy-package. Maybe @sgrogan can have another look. Pivy 0.6.5a0 has the fix included.