PIL cutting off letters

[Matt Haggard]

I'm using PIL (Python Imaging Library) to generate button images.
They consist of a left end image, a middle, repeating image and a
right side image.... anyway, that's not important

I'm using a TTF font for the text of the button (Verdana.TTF) and it
keeps cutting the bottom part of the the g's q's and y's off.

Here's the important parts of my code (options contains command-line
params):

im = Image.new("RGB",(1,1))
font = ImageFont.truetype(options.font,options.fontsize)
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
textsize = draw.textsize(options.text, font=font)
im = im.resize( (totalwidth, maxheight) )
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
thecolor = "rgb(0,0,0)"
x = (totalwidth - textsize[0]) / 2
y = (maxheight - textsize[1]) / 2 + options.offsetY
draw.text((x, y), options.text, font=font, fill=thecolor )
im.save(savefile, quality=100)

If I increase the font-size to larger than about 16, the tails
appear... any clue as to why this happens or what I can do to fix it?