Indeed, reading through afm.py, it looks like it expects all of the reads to return bytestrings given that it does comparisons against literal byte-strings.

This piqued my interest a bit, and I noticed that we are inconsistent with how we are opening the AFM files. Grepping through reveals a few more non-binary open() calls. Would you like to fix those, too?

actually, looks like that was the only one, although the one in font_manager.py could benefit from context manager. I'll backport just this.

Backported to v2.x via08e2520.