Also I need this to be cross-platform.
And I doubt mac users will have arial.ttf on their system. :/
And I doubt mac users will have arial.ttf on their system. :/
As for imagefonts, you can load a .ttf from anywhere, not just the windows fonts folder, so you can include the .ttf file with your distribution. By using the same .ttf file on Mac and PC, the output should look the same.
If you want to legally distribute fonts with your app/game, you'll need to make sure that's permitted (I wouldn't suggest trying it with Microsoft's Arial for example <g>). One set of fonts that's allowed to be redistributed (as long as you don't try to sell just the fonts alone) is Arkpandora ( http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/gavindi ). This set has replacements for Arial, Monospace, Times, and Verdana. If you don't feel like messing with the .tgz there, I've mirrored the fonts as a zip at http://astronavis.com/arkpandora204.zip .
These aren't unicode fonts, though they support the umlauted and other accented European characters. For unicode TTFs, one free (GNU GPL) source is http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/freefont (though the fonts there only support a subset of characters at present).