Methods and systems for managing the access and display of characters from one or more fonts may include initializing a storage space (e.g., a font cache) in a computer memory. The storage space may store information for select characters from the one or more fonts, allowing easy access by a font management routine. In the meantime, a second storage space (e.g., hard disk or DVD) stores information relating to all the characters from one or more fonts, which may be contained in one or more files. The font management routine receives an indication of a desired character to be rendered and determines whether the desired character is currently stored in the first storage space, the font management routine (or a related routine) may load the desired character from the second storage space into the first storage space.