多平台环境中的字体

What is the best way to deal with fonts in a multi-platform distributed system? If I want to use a common font across all systems to show to the user, what's the best way to do this. From the little I've been reading each platform looks to have fonts that are of the same family (ie serif, sans-serif) but with different names. CSS looks to have the functionality baked in where it will make the best selection it can of font on the users machine. Is there similar functionality either in system libraries or external libraries for Windows & Linux. I'm using C++ mainly?What is the best way to deal with fonts in a mu