Sometimes** (**I'm thinking of the web, here, really) you only need a subset of glyphs in a font. A full font file can be pretty bandwidth-heavy.
cut_font
will snip a font down to only the characters given on the command line. It will use the same output format as input format.
It doesn't handle glyph variations (like italics or bold versions of a font) nor let you choose the output file; sorry about that; patches welcome.
$ ./cut_font Symbola.ttf ≄ a b C D \`