This invention relates to a character display apparatus and method for a DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) player. According to the present invention, it is provided that font data of at least some of multi-languages to be used in multilingual subtitle processing are recorded on certain area(s) of a DVD, the recorded font data are stored in a font memory at initial stage of playback, the stored font data corresponding to a language selected by selection input of a user are then read, characters for subtitle processing of the selected language are displayed. Therefore, the manufacturing cost of DVD players can be reduced due to the reduction of memory capacity requied and DVDs can be maximum efficiently utilized. A character display method including receiving into a character displaying device a first font data, the first font data for displaying character data, storing, in a first memory area, the received first font data; storing, in a second memory area, a second font data that is different than the first font data stored in the first memory area; and displaying the character data to have a font defined by at least one of the first font data stored in the first memory area and the second font data stored in the second memory area.