I'm bad at these threads because I just throw shit out there, but you could check out:
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
Too lazy to see if it's based on the GD library, but know I've used it it some strange demo applications where I wasn't using any PHP image library, but used it from tick` calls from php (and command line).
And thus, my random spew bumps your post.
