I’ve created a memory mapped 1 bit interface to an LCD in an embedded system, along with 4 or 5 bit mapped fonts for the 90+ printable ASCII characters. Writing to the screen is as simple as using an echo like statement (it’s embedded Linux).
Other than something strictly proprietory, what recommendations can people make for storing German (or Spanish, or French for that mattter)? Unicode seems to be a pretty heavy hitter.
If I understand you right, you are searching a lightwight encoding for german characters? In Europe, you normaly use Latin-1 or better ISO 8859-15. This is a 8-Bit ASCII extension containing most of the characters used by western languages.