First off, thanks to everybody for your great information. It really gave me a lot to think about, and some great starting points.

PDFlib would have been perfect, but it has a stamp on it on the free version, and yea, it costs about 5x what my budget is.

I tried out fly, and it works great, but I would have had to modify it to get it to work with a different font. But i'll be using it in some other graphic reports areas.

GD would have worked great, but after a couple of hours of installing and tinkering it still didn't quite work.

All of this lead me to PerlMagick, which did everything but use postscript fonts, with only a 5 minute install. (well, should have been if I had actually followed the instructions to reboot). I found a program to convert postscript to truetype (not the best, but at the size I need the fonts, it should work). With all that, it seems to be working fairly well.

Thanks for all your responses!
~Erich