It really depends on what you want the outcome to look like. The first method will make angular fonts more round (using Arial in this example), which is an undesired effect sometimes. Second one doesn't look too bad, compared to the third one, and should work well on smaller sizes.

Even if Stefan only added something like outlinetext = true; where we couldn't specify thickness, it would be better than nothing.

Aye.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish with outline text? In what event would it be used? If it was pretty much anything but player-chat text, couldn't you just make an image? and use that instead? Of course it would be annoying, but good things take work.

Increases readability of text ten-fold and also looks way better than naked text.