George,
Like BB says, it is not a simple matter of firing a character at the screen.
For example, for fonts, if the GLCD doesn't have a built-in character memory then you have to build characters in cells, for example 8x5 or 7x5 or whatever.
e.g. $7E,$11,$11,$11,$7E,$00, // 65 - A - 41
This can be sent to an area on the GLCD.
But, all of this means a lot of logic line switching to define the area or location where you are sending a block.
Larger fonts require more data points for a larger cell obviously.
As BB says, other switching can (after reading the Data Sheet) can put a spot/pixel on the screen at a co-ordinate specified by a previous command.
By sending bytes you can define x pixels in one hit to speed things up.
This is where you have to make all those control and data lines go on-off at the right time and in the right order !!
Do the maths an you can produce lines an circles.
Take it another level and you can plonk images on the screen.
And even if you did manage it, after a year or two, then it would be
so slow compared to an interpeter firmware chip - where you could serially fire a character at the screen and get on with your own programming. A pukka chip is probably 50 to 100 times faster than you trying to do it on PICAXE.
Also, and I don't mean to poo-poo that wonderful institution of Ebay, but I have heard of some 'low-cost' (crap) GLCDs not working correctly with interpreter chips.
So, if you get one and it doesn't work then you ask yourself; is it the GLCD or is it my code? (Most likely the code of course, so sorry.)
Personally, I'd say forget it.
When you are a newbie it's best to start off with
some things that work