On the part about taking fonts and turning them into a list of dots, maybe something like this will give you an idea (this is crude). It may take some fiddling to see what fonts and sizes work best, but you can always write out the result to a binary file and display it in your tk interface for a preview (or just print in text as I did below). Converting the getPixel results to the appropriate format for transfer to your display device should be straightforward.

use strict;
use GD;
        
# create a new image
my ($width,$height) = (50, 20);
my $im = new GD::Image($width,$height);

# allocate some colors
my $white = $im->colorAllocate(255,255,255);
my $black = $im->colorAllocate(0,0,0);       

# Put a black frame around the picture
$im->rectangle(0,0,$width-1,$height-1,$black);

# some TTF text:
# (colour, font, pointsize, angle, x, y, string)
my @bounds = $im->stringTTF($black,'c:/i386/times.ttf',14,0,2,17,'JaPh
+!');
if (!@bounds) {print "TTF error: $@\n";}

for my $y (0..$height-1) {
  for my $x (0..$width-1) {
    print $im->getPixel($x,$y) ? 'X':'.';
  }
  print "\n";
}
print "\n";
[download]

For Times, this gives:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
X................................................X
X................................................X
X................................................X
X................................................X
X...........................XXX..................X
X..XXXXXX........XXXXXXXXX..XXX........XX........X
X....XX............XX..XXXX..XX........XX........X
X....XX............XX...XXX..XX........XX........X
X....XX...XXXXXX...XX....XX..XX.XXXX...XX........X
X....XX...XX.XXX...XX...XXX..XXX.XXX...XX........X
X....XX...XX..XX...XXX.XXXX..XX...XX...XX........X
X....XX.....XXXX...XXXXXXX...XX...XX...XX........X
X....XX....XXXXX...XX........XX...XX...X.........X
X....XX...XXX.XX...XX........XX...XX.............X
X....XX...XX..XX...XX........XX...XX.............X
X.XX.XX...XXXXXXX..XX.......XXXX..XXX..XX........X
X.XXXX....XXXXXXXXXXXXX.....XXXX.XXXX..XX........X
X................................................X
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
[download]

Update: Dang, da beat me to it!

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser