On Adafruit Show and Tell Wednesday, Joey Castillo demonstrated a fork of the widely used Adafruit GFX library with Unicode characters.

Hi there, Joey here! I shared the Unicode fork of the GFX library at tonight’s show and tell. Thanks for the positive feedback! It was great to show some of my work, and to see what members of the community are building. Here’s the link to the repository:

https://github.com/joeycastillo/Adafruit-GFX-Library

It’s mostly a drop-in replacement for the main GFX library; the only breaking change is that it removes the ability to setFont to a graphic font. Other than that, the interface is identical, with a couple of new methods for displaying code points and UTF-8 strings.

I hope that the community finds it useful, and hope to be back on the show and tell in the coming weeks to share progress on this universal text reader project!

From GitHub: This fork of the Adafruit GFX Library aims to support the seamless display of text in all the languages of the world. It achieves this by replacing the standard 5×7 font with the GNU Unifont, an 8×16 (in some cases 16×16) pixel font that includes glyphs for every Unicode code point in the basic multilingual plane (BMP). It also removes all support for graphic fonts.

This should function as a drop-in replacement for the Adafruit GFX Library, as long as you’re not using graphic fonts. You can display a Unicode code point by calling display.writeCodepoint(c), where c represents the Unicode code point (not its UTF-8 or UTF-16 representation). You can display a UTF-8 encoded string with the display.printUTF8(s) and display.printlnUTF8(s) methods; I’ve included a Very Strict UTF-8 Decoder that will turn well-formed UTF-8 into code points suitable for display with writeCodepoint.

See GitHub for extensive details.

Will this new capability help you use graphical displays? Let us know in the comments below.