Print nice looking text on an image without imagepsloadfont()?

Hello,

I am producing a script that writes text onto a JPEG image to create
custom printable gift certificates for an online store. The basics of
the scripts are straight forward. However I found that the
imagestring() function produces absolutely horrible looking pixelized
text and on these gift certificates looks are important. I attempted
to use the imagepsloadfont() and imagepstext() functions but they do
not appear to be installed. It's a shared server and I have no way to
recompile PHP with t1lib.

Is there any other way to produce nice looking anti-aliased text on an
image? I'd appreciate any information, classes, links, guides...
anything you can point me to.

Thanks!
Kevin Stone