Fonts Role in Web-based Character display
(Excerpted from an article for MultiLingual Computing and technology by Suzanne Topping, Localization Unlimited, 1999)
The third piece in the character display puzzle is fonts. If you define fonts that don't exist on your users systems, it won't matter if the encoding method you choose is supported by their browser or not. They still will not be able to view the text.
There are a variety of potential solutions to this problem, as described below.
Distributing Fonts―One way to make sure users have the required fonts is to distribute a full set once, so that they can be installed on user systems. The downside to this approach is file size (most Unicode fonts are several megabytes in size.)
Glyph Servers―These proxy servers substitute inline bitmaps for non-ASCII characters in the current page. The glyph server retrieves a document, and then parses the HTML to replace non-displayable characters with an <IMG> element. Each <IMG> element points to a bitmap image of the glyph. The client eventually receives the edited HTML along with all the new images. The resulting display is fairly accurate, but retrieval time is long, and the text can no longer be treated as text since it is now stored graphically. 
Embedding Fonts―This approach allows you to send fonts with individual web pages. Unfortunately different browsers supply varying levels of support for embedded fonts. Some browsers control font display themselves, while others rely more heavily on the operating system's font display handling. 
Microsoft provides embedding information and also provides a font embedding SDK for downloading at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/default.htm.
Font Aquisition―The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed an approach for dealing with fonts through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Their solution gives user agents four ways to select fonts for HTML elements: 
•	Fonts listed in style sheets can be matched exactly to fonts installed on the system. 
•	Fonts can be matched to a similar font if the specified font does not exist on the system.
•	Fonts can be downloaded if a match can't be made, and if a URL for downloading is included.
•	Fonts can be created or synthesized as needed, based on the font's description in the style sheet. 
The CSS Level 2 Specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html) describes this font matching process in detail.