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Which display is best for displaying multiple languages?

Posted: Sun May 11, 2008 10:37 pm
by slycker
Hi,
I've spent a bit of time wading through a number of your documents, but am still not sure which display is best for my purpose. I'm planning a simple display (graphic/lcd/vfd, via serial or usb - it doesn't really matter to me) to display the current artist/album/song that is playing on my music server (MPD running on a headless linux computer). The music collection is quite multi-lingual (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese), and the songs are generally tagged in unicode format.
It's been a while since I really got bogged down in multi-lingual font issues, and really just want something that works without having to worry about detecting language and selecting the correct font.

What display/approach would be best for this purpose?
Thanks,
B

Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 7:53 am
by Ray
I have some bad news for you none of our displays support unicode out of the box. There are a couple of options though

1) Our glk/glc series allow you to define 254 characters per font, you could make multiple fonts with all the characters you need and just switch font if you need to draw a character thats not a regular character. This option is limited however by the ammount of memory on the unit (16 kb for most units)

2) Another option if to use a glk/glc unit render the unicode string to a bitmap on the pc side and just sending over a bitmap to the unit.

Both options would require you to do quite some programming though.