Unfortunately the current GD-2.0.1 has a bug which prevents truetype fonts from being anti-aliased correctly on truecolor images. This is fixed in GD-2.0.2 which unfortunatelyt doesn't exist. As of PHP 4.3 we have bundled GD2 with PHP and fixed this and many other bugs. Compare these two: If we turn off alpha blending or use a negative color index we get: If we zoom in on the 'A' we can really see the anti-aliasing at work: