You can store just the unicode characters to the db if you wish, the conversion script can convert both unicode, shortnames, as well as ascii text :-) to the images/svgs.

Storing the :shortnames: was just our suggestion because we've found that many web stacks aren't setup to handle multi-byte/UTF-8 characters by from the get-go. Doing it this way is an easier over-all approach, but by all means feel free to take our tools and customize to your own needs.

@font-face would definitely be the ideal solution, and hopefully something we can implement once the browser support is there, but at the moment we're trying to go for the most universal approach.