Extended Font character support?

[gnbl]

The following does not display properly:

>>> import vga2_8x8
>>> display.text(vga2_8x8, "AOU ÄÖÜ äöüß áàâ", 0, y, st7789.RED)

Neither does

>>> display.text(vga2_8x8, b"AOU ÄÖÜ äöüß áàâ".decode('ascii'), 0, y, st7789.RED)

What's wrong?

[russhughes]

The text method uses the old IBM PC BIOS Character fonts that do not contain many extended characters. The write method uses fonts converted from TrueType fonts using the font2bitmap.py program in utils. The write method supports UTF-8 and extended characters. For an example see: https://github.com/russhughes/st7789_mpy/blob/4d7f2b60d60b739325502285987c3830814d7688/examples/proverbs/proverbs.py and https://github.com/russhughes/st7789_mpy/blob/4d7f2b60d60b739325502285987c3830814d7688/examples/proverbs/proverbs_font.py

[gnbl]

But most are in there: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/russhughes/st7789_mpy/master/docs/vga2_8x8.png
I guess my question is how to convert a string literal (in the source code's default UTF-8) to an ASCII coded string that text() can handle to use the available glyphs.
Or is my assumption wrong and these fonts do not represent ASCII?

[gnbl]

OK so ASCII is only 7 bits. Latin-1, then.

>>> ord('ä')
228
>>> chr(228)
'ä'
>>> 'ä'
'ä'
>>> 'ä'.encode()
b'\xc3\xa4'
>>> chr(0xe4)
'ä'
>>> b'\xe4'
b'\xe4'
>>> b'\xe4'.decode('latin1')
'ä'
>>> b'\xe4'.decode('latin-1')
'ä'
>>> 'ä'.encode('latin1')
b'\xe4'

This is Python on my computer, I'll give it another try on the ESP32 in about 12 hrs.

[gnbl]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
Python 3.10.6 on linux:

>>> 'äöü'.encode('cp437')
b'\x84\x94\x81'

Micropython:

>>> "äöü".encode('cp437')
b'\xc3\xa4\xc3\xb6\xc3\xbc'

It should raise an error instead of ignoring the encoding parameter completely.

Regardless, I know what the problem is now, thanks.