This may seem extreme, but it fixes a long-standing bug that was exacerbated by using a lot more Unicode on Python 2.  FT2Font could not properly open a font whose path contained non-ascii characters.  This new approach uses Python to open the file (which does know how to handle that correctly) and then passes a file handle rather than a file path to freetype.  This is very similar to a fix that went in the `png` extension a few months ago, but it's more complicated here because freetype doesn't make it very easy.