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Requiring a ton of work doesn't really matter one way or the other for copyright. Mowing the lawn is a ton of work. Doing the work doesn't let you prevent other people from mowing their lawn to the same height as yours.

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Additional information on this point: "Sweat of the brow" [1] is a doctrine which grants copyright on a work due to the time and effort the author put into making it. The US Supreme Court rejected this doctrine, meaning that only the creative aspects of a work are relevant to copyright. For that reason, in the US, a phone book is not copyrightable unless the arrangement of its contents is creative [2].

The EU narrowly rejects "sweat of the brow" copyright for recreations of public domain visual art [1]. I have no idea whether the same applies to font faces, public domain non-visual art, or phone books, but I'm assuming that it doesn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

That work I was referring to is a creative, artistic process of designing a font based on a historical starting point. That does matter. Hardly mowing the lawn or compiling a phone book.

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