Thank you. I have now looked briefly at Blender's option to extrude SVG. That may eventually be my option.

My other option is to write my own image to OBJ (or whatever) converter. Input a black and white graphic at one end; and out pops a 3d object with all the necessary quads. I wonder why there are lots of similar freeware apps available?

My thanks again to jestmark. I am not actually adverse to 'learning basic modeling', but I understand the theory alot better than I know what each program does, or how well each one performs.