Offset text from a line

I've written a program for Acad2K that allows you to select a bunch of
lines, and it automatically labels each line with its distance. This
works fine, but I need a way to offset the text from the line by a
certain distance. Is there any easy way to do this? My one idea was
to actually offset the line and have the text center on the offset,
but this didn't work too well. I'd also rather have a better way of
doing it. Suggestions???