Hi,

You could have a look at some of the 7-segment driver components (Maxim?), & see how they cope with timing - I think there is an "off" moment between each step of the cycle.
If you're working with a wide array of dots, there is a great temptation to take the easy way out & drive the thing as a long sequence of bytes, which gives a horrificly low duty cycle. Short story : a colleague ran an 8x30 LED alarm status display like this. With a 3% duty cycle, it was invisible during daylight hours! I re-wrote the driver to run in the "other" direction, giving a 12% duty cycle. It didn't take much more effort to output 4 bytes at once instead of 1, & the difference was amazing!

Regards,

Richard.be