Reliable delivery of fonts is considered a critical requirement for SVG. Designers should be able to create SVG graphics with whatever fonts they care to use and then the same fonts should appear in the end user's browser when viewing an SVG drawing, even if the given end user hasn't purchased the fonts in question. This parallels the print world, where the designer uses a given font when authoring a drawing for print, but when the end user views the same drawing within a magazine the text appears with the correct font.
SVG utilizes CSS2's WebFont facility as a key mechanism for reliable delivery of font data to end users. A common scenario is that SVG authoring applications will generate compressed, subsetted web fonts for all text elements included in a given SVG document. Typically, the web fonts will be saved in a nearby location to the SVG document itself.