The ScanFont documentation suggets that, on a good day, downhill with the wind behind you, creating a font with ScanFont and FontLab can take as little as five minutes ... I was very skeptical about how this would translate into real world terms, but actually I just did one which took only about 10 minutes in ScanFont and FontLab, if you don't count false starts and a couple of dummy runs when I'd forgotten to specify the height and so on - oh, and a couple of hours tweaking the master in Photoshop first ... it's only 26 characters, lower case, there's plenty of tweaking and polishing left to do:

Then my copy of Alexander Nesbitt's collection Decorative Alphabets and Initials came today - it's from 1959, but it feels new! - and what a delight! ;-) To get a relationship with the book straight away, I scanned the alphabet that seemed simplest for the software, just simple solid outlines, good black colour, a complete alphabet, the Westminster Abbey brasses in plate 47 - I had a usable set of capital letters with a couple of mouse clicks, but for some reason the decorations took hours to get right ...

I made a 'J' too, there wasn't one, using the 'I' and the top right of the 'K', flipped and stretched, it took a bit of fiddling, but I think it's convincing in the end.