Of primary importance for high quality, is the need for error resilience (in the presence of packet loss) in the bitstream.
The origin of this technology really started with Bitstream's release of "TrueDoc," which was an open source solution that stores character shapes in special compressed files called Portable Font Resource (PFR).
The one significant drawback to the Bitstream approach is that some users may need to install the Font Player plug-in, however many browsers already have it included.