quote:

---

Graphics vs. Text - Choosing a Display for your App

The benefits of a graphics display are obvious--it can show graphs, icons, and bitmapped pictures. What's not obvious is that the right graphics display is also the best choice for many text-only applications.

Text capabilities of the Graphic Displays can go beyond conventional alphanumeric displays with:

* Font scaling to display text in four sizes
* Multiple, user-defined fonts
* And, of course, many graphics capabilities

Many of the Graphic Display text features are impossible to achieve with standard alphanumeric LCDs.

Limitations of Alphanumeric LCDs

Alphanumeric LCDs have two basic sets of limitations

* Layout of the LCD screen
* Design of the controller

An alphanumeric LCD screen is divided into clusters with vertical and horizontal gutters in between. The gutters, which contain no pixels, separate the individual characters and lines of the display.

Given the design of standard alphanumeric LCDs, we can quickly identify some desirable text-formatting jobs that they just cannot do, such as Fancy headline fonts, dingbat fonts, etc.

The Solution: Graphics LCD + Intelligent Controller

Matrix Orbital has been engineering enhanced Serial Interface boards since 1995, each new revision resulting in more capabilities for alphanumeric displays, such as underlines, and custom characters.

However, even with these advantages, they lack the look of Graphic Displays due to the character gutters, or spacing.

The GLK modules are one of the more recent and excellent additions to the Matrix Orbital line of products. Innovative and labor saving, these modules allow you to download high quality fonts in any size, style or language. Graphic functions include primitives like pixels, lines, rectangles, bar graphs etc.

Advantages of Graphic LCDs

_________________
Nick Hesson
Sales Rep.
Matrix Orbital