> a complete 5*7 LCD font into 256 bytes of EEPROM ?

I believe there are LCD fonts out there

You should look here too

http://www.piclist.com/techref/datafile/charsets.htm

If, however, you do have spare program memory available, and
that's quite likely, you could put an uncompressed font in it

Each byte of 16F program flash is 14 bits wide, ie 2 * 7. If you
used 5 bytes of flash for pairs of characters, that would be 175
bytes, assuming a full set of upper and lower case + numbers +
a few punctuation etc, say 70 characters in all => 2.5 * 70. Use
the ASCII code to find the pair base address, odd/even to find
which half of the data in the 5 bytes at that address

You treat flash exactly the same way as EEPROM for R/W, but
it has the advantage of being more convenient in storage terms for
your application

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