The main difference between the display I'll likely use (the one linked earlier) and the empeg display is that although the small display is bitmapped, it only lends itself to fixed-width fonts. The inter-character spacing is enforced by lack of pixels between each 5x7 character cell. That doesn't prevent me from making I and l appear the same, but the current font I'm using does display the two differently. It was a while ago, but I seem to recall that finding a suitable font and converting it (for the microcontroller sw) was annoying, and since I already did it I don't want to do it again.

In any event, changing one bit in the font file is trivial. (Determining which bit should be only slightly less trivial...)