I want to draw words in a single stroke with a pen plotter using mergelines and the cursive font. However, glyphs like d don't connect because the incoming stroke is not present and the downstroke is seperated.

vpype text --font cursive "bird" linemerge show

It's unclear to me how the pickled fonts were generated, and what the process for updating them looks like.
It looks like it'd be a matter of adding a few segments that trace back on themselves, as does happen in some sans-serif fonts.