I like stb_truetype myself. It's C so you'll have to bind it if you're using any other language, but it's a lot simpler than Freetype. (Less features too, but it'll take a .ttf and return a bitmap, which sounds like what you want.)
In comparison, Freetype is absolutely monsterous; it is a few times faster according to some benchmarks I've found, but a few orders of magnitude bigger too. Sometimes you don't need the fastest, you just want something simple that works.