@roger64--Thank you for the compliment!
This process is very useful if the only thing available is a graphic in raster format (bitmap, png, etc). For example, a screenshot, or a page from a pdf document, or a logo created in a graphics editor. It can be used for images other than text.
If you have a decorative font you wish to use, for a titlepage for example, you could use that font to create the vector graphic in Inkscape.
I'm just beginning to learn all this stuff, but there is a simple tutorial available here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/He...t_and_Inkscape