jagged edges on text, Why???

hello to everyone, first i just wanted to say thanks to all the people that respond to the posts, ive learned lots of cool and useful info about photoshop. i need help on text that i just cant seem to get smoth edges. i tried saving it as gif, jpg,tiff. the thing is that i need transparency, not for the web but for a restaurant menu, when i save as gif, i get extremely bad edges, now as jpg the image is ok but i have the white background. im doing the layout in publisher, where i could click the with BG as transparent but i still get jagged edges.
any tips, i also tried 72, 150, and 300 res. but no luck. any help would be appreciated since i have the deadline in 2 days. thanks in advance to all taking the time to read this thread

Are you saving it as a GIF-128? Or in otherwords a GIF with 128 colors? If not, select GIF 128 in the Optimize toolbar.