font to img problem

[dhimahi]

I have managed to get my PHP write an image from arial.ttf. My problem is:

1.) The image is very bad. The qualiti of JPG that is generated by PHP is realy bad. Can I set the quality of the JPG and can I make instead of JPG a GIF (ofcourse it has to be heigh quality too)?

2.) If I put another font it will not work. It does generate the image but without proper text. Only some sort of squers. Is generating of images trough font working only for some type of fonts, and if it is what fonts are working?

Can you tell me a good resource about generating images trough fonts and please help me fix my problems.

Thanx

[suntra]

You can't make gif with GD... I think it's something about copyright... but you can create PNG images, which are almost like gif. See imagepng()