Not at all. This is just a special case (peculiarity of the GD and ImageMagick). Almost 99% of other asset, resource and standard files works well. `file_get_contents`, `fopen` and so forth could handle files inside PHARs without any problems.

I would be very happy if `imagettfbbox()` would allow to specify binary font data instead of bare TrueType font file path. But unfortunately this is [not the case](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8203188/unexpected-problems-with-php-phar) and there is only one (idiotic) workaround.