My approach in Gimp is to create the million layers of text labels. Then use the move tool with 'move selected layer' selected to get all the text in the right places. Then hide all non-text layers. Right click on the layers dialogue and go to Merge Visible Layers... That will get you all you text in one layer. Then you can mess with this to get layer styles and so on. Generally I duplicate the layer, invert the colour and gaussian blur it. I move this below the original text layer and it gives a nice outer glow. I also drop the opacity of the original layer a little.

Hope that helps.