StretchBlt and text

What's the most efficient and easy (assuming both can be done) way of
putting transparent text over a StretchBlted bitmap?

The context is a map display, on which I need to place various labels,
for example the names of towns and cities, which I'm currently doing
with a control array of transparent labels - not a very satisfactory
method for various reasons.

I could imagine having an invisible PictureBox, printing the text
fields into there and blatting each image to the main map, but I'm not
sure if that's the best way, and would like to check before I
investigate how to do that.

It would be nice to have control of the size, font, colour, etc of the
text too, if that's a consideration.

Many thanks in advance.
.

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