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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.

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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.

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Thanks. That'll do nicely. –  Jamie Sep 20 '10 at 16:10

Well, UTF-8 isn't that big. I recommend it if you want to be able to use one or more languages where you don't find a matching char in Latin-1.

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The logic of UTF-8 may not be that big, but the glyph space it covers certainly is. It's kinda pointless to use an encoding that can represent all of Unicode when talking to hardware that doesn't have the capability to actually display all those glyphs. –  Michael Borgwardt Sep 20 '10 at 13:38
I'm not really sure it's worth the trouble to care about encoding of strings, or simply use utf-8 and implement displaying the chars you need. –  Reactormonk Sep 20 '10 at 14:09

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