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Couldn’t you have a program to print the font to a big PDF and then re-ingest it?

PDF files embed the vectors outlines for the letters used in the text and it's trivial to extract those into a font file. However, as the mathematical representation of the typeface is under copyright, this conversion does not make it free because the vector curves remain the same. The process would also likely lose the fine tuning of a professional typeface like the kerning, so it would not be desirable anyways.

What about printing it into a static image and then extracting the curves?

In Photoshop:

Make text

Rasterize text later

Select layer pixels

Use the tool that vectorizes pixel selections, it’s in the bottom of the vector layers panel

Open vectors in Illustrator

This won’t generate as clean of paths as a person would, though.

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