The character encoding (font type - latin, russian, japanese) of a page is determined by the character set used by your Operating System (Windows, Apple, Linux etc) or HTML page editor (Notepad, Frontpage, NVU etc). Webmasters will need to determine this setting before including the character set meta-tag.
The character set most used internationally is iso-8859-1, although utf-8 is now becoming popular. Users of Microsoft Operating Systems may find their character set is a windows derivative. These webmasters should be aware that not all of their websites visitors will have access to windows character sets.
All webmasters should be aware that webhosting servers (typically Apache or IIS) may send character set headers that will likely override the meta-tag setting. For many western webmasters this is a minor inconvenience, but non-western webmasters wishing to use their native character sets may find that their site doesn't display correctly. Images and other HTML elements should still display correctly, but fonts might be unreadable.
You will need to contact your webhosting company or IT administrator if you believe the server is overriding your character set choice.
Some scripting languages allow the webmaster to define the character set before the browser receives the HTML part of your page. If you are using a scripting language such as cgi, php, asp, asp.net, and you define your character set this way, then including the character set META tag is not necessary and should be removed from the head of your document.