dougp:
Integers are two bytes each.
which is hilarious on an 8bit processor, but i had forgotten that, need to change that to byte type, and i can come down even more memory 
The null terminator is only one byte. This would be better written as...
well this null terminator for some reason is represented by 2 characters, i had tried the -1 instead of -2 prior to this and i would continually get + and - as characters at the end of my strings on the Matrix LED