How does font fallback work on a non-Windows OS?

Question

I have been reading a lot of documentation on how to create an internationalised ASP.NET application, using C# 3.5. They all seem to give the general impression that font fallback and font linking will make font choice a non-issue.

However, the documentation I have seems to imply that it will be fine on Windows, but doesn't mention other OSs, like for the Mac and Linux.

There is no font that supports all characters for all languages, but if your clients are using Windows 2000 or later, it is sufficient to use a single font throughout an application due to font linking and font fallback. This means that your system will determine a font appropriate for the machine's culture. (source)

Will this magically work on a Mac/Linux, or is there some extra legwork involved in supporting these platforms?

Answer 1

If your application isn't producing any sort of documents like PDFs, Excel files or whatnot ASP.Net isn't really responsible for font handling. CSS will be.

Answer 2

For web applications, you have to specify that font fallback yourself, in your CSS files using the font-family directive - documentation for which is available at W3