Hope this is helpful to quickly create selectable text in Maya (put the text in quotes after the -t argument):
examples:
textCurves -ch 0 -f "Arial-Regular" -t "roll"; textCurves -ch 0 -f "Arial-Regular" -t "cheek"; textCurves -ch 0 -f "Arial-Regular" -t "narrow";
Also i'm thinking of writing a hotkey/short script that adds whatever selected (edges,faces, poly ..) to the current items in view--isolate. This way can work on inner mouth and eye topology areas and get extruded results added to the isolated viewed items quickly.
cheers,
Nate