Well, I had this loopy idea: use the Windows Paintbrush program (always 
assuming you have windows, but I expect anything else would have a similar 
program and feature) to tell you how to graph letters in different fonts.

This is what I suggest. Go into paintbrush, select the 'abc' button to write 
text, and then take the 'Text' menu option to change the font to something 
you like, and a size that's not too small (you need to experiment a bit 
here). Type a couple of words. If you then do menu option 'View' and 
'Zoom in', you can get a graphed blow-up of the letters. You can screen 
print this directly, if it looks OK, or to join lots of bits together, 
you can try this:

Take whatever the command is to take a copy of the current screen to the 
edit buffer (Alt-print screen in Windows, to send the screen to the 
clipboard), do 'File' and 'New' to get a clean edit area, then paste. 
Use the scissors icon to highlight just your grid pattern piece, and 
copy that. You can use this method to build up a composite file of words, 
just pasting multiple bits in.

The reason I suggest this for letters, is that Windows (and other 
similar products) already use a square grid base for all the different 
fonts. Rather than trying to get a good cut at a letter 'by hand', why 
not use what someone's already spent some time perfecting?

If any of you out there have program compilers, you may well be able to 
get down to this level of detail on a font without resorting to paintbrush: 
for example, the Microsoft developers kit has a font editor.