scaling up a font just so autotrace won't create curves out of the pixels? sounds like a hack compared to finding a program which converts pixels into squares.
Autotrace is the wrong apporoach here imo. Yes, fonts usually consist of quadratic curves, but they perfectly well support straight lines (and as a result the files will become pretty small, too). There is no reason why the original pixels cannot be converted with full precision using horizontal and vertical lines. Maybe the tool that can do this was not available.
