Customer:
I just received my Inkplate 10 and I’m struggling to display Umlauts such as “öäüÖÄÜß”. They don’t seem to be contained in the fonts I’ve discovered so far. Can you recommend a method or font to display Umlauts on the device?
Originally submitted via email support on 22 July 2024. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.
Soldered Support:
These characters aren’t supported natively, as in Adafruit GFX which the Inkplate library is based on, only ASCII is supported.
For a project that needed to write in Arabic on Inkplate, I found the core of the Adafruit GFX library with full UTF-8 support, which has all the characters you need: https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/08/the-adafruit-gfx-library-now-supports-unicode-adafruit-adafruit-josecastillo/
I’ve made a version of the Inkplate library with UTF-8 support that I’ve tested on Inkplate 10: https://github.com/SolderedElectronics/Inkplate-Arduino-library/tree/utf8-support
It’s slightly unofficial but give that a try. There’s a step in the procedure where you select which character sets to include in the library (including all of UTF-8 would take a ridiculous amount of memory, so you can include only the required ones).
Be aware that only the default font is supported, which can look a bit blocky and not too pretty. If you get stuck or need me to go over exactly how I did this in my projects, let me know.
Customer:
I tried the updated library you recommended but was unsatisfied with the default font. As a workaround I chose to display images instead of text.
Soldered Support:
The solution with displaying images is a good approach. You can render an image to display on Inkplate remotely and host that image at a constant address, periodically updating it on Inkplate.