Scanned in drafts + Illustrator + Changes

So I've scanned in the entirety of Pixel, a-z & A-Z, and also touched up the images so they're not as noisy. 

After scanning them in, I opened the jpeg files up in photoshop, as the scanner did not give me the option to scan in bitmap format (although it allowed me to scan it in purely black & white), and ironed out any rough edges, although I didn't spend too long doing this as each drawing is only being used as a guidline. 

Additionally, I did try drawing over the scanned in lines with the line tool, and while this worked really well, all in all it wasn't beneficial enough for the amount of time that was consumed doing it.  So instead I erased any over-lapping lines and rough edges.

After smoothing out the letterforms, I re-sized them to a width of 1500px. In hindsight, this probably wasn't the best idea. It doesn't save me any time, nor is it an accurate way of getting everything the same size,b in fact it's probably detrimental to the entire process as not only have I spent time re-sizing them and saving them, I also have to re-size the image in Illustrator so it is the same size as everything else.

I've started doing some work in Illustrator, I've had some problems with it. First of all, I can't find out how to cut a shape out of an existing shape. So for example letters like b, o, and a, this has been a problem. I've gotten around it, but I'm not sure if the method I've used will work. Currently I've drawn the initial shape and then drawn the shape that I want to cut out, on top of the initial shape. I predict that when I finally import the shae into fontlab, it's going to cause problems if I leave it the way it is. 

Additionally I've also made some changes to some of the letter. Specifically the i and the j. When zoomed out, these characters looked out of place, so I looked at the x-height and the ascender height and then top of the stem was a different height to the x-height and was way too close to the ascender height. Basically hanging around in no-mans land. So I lowered the stem, changed the k accordingly and also documented the new sizes so that i can make subsequent changes to all the other lower-case characters.

Finally I've also managed to install the full copy of fontlab and illustrator, I need to find out how to import the shapes I draw, into font lab. The thing that is taking up the majority of my time is learning new processes and figuring out solutions to any problems I can encounter. Currently trying to find out how to import correctly into fontlab using .eps files instead of simply copy and pasting from Illustrator.