[cairo] Drawing text halos?

[Ian Britten]

Hi all,
I'm wondering if anyone has any experience drawing 'halos' (for lack of
a better term) around text, similar to how Google Maps draws their text?
It's a second (background) colour, used to provide contrast so the text
is visible/legible when drawn over cluttered data.
And if so, does anyone have any techniques/approaches they could share?

<Background>
We have an existing rendering framework that draws to multiple types
of backends, only one of which is Cairo.  All our text rendering is
done via FreeType (We have our own rasterization code, which I'm mostly 
bypassing when rendering to Cairo).
This halo effect applies both to stock TT fonts, as well as our
internal 'stick' fonts.
</Background>

Our current approach involves first drawing the boundary of the glyph
with an arbitrary lineweight (via FT_Outline_Decompose) before then
rendering the glyph as usual.

One problem with this approach trying to come up with an appropriate
thickness, for which our current approach is sub-optimal, and leads
to illegible text, especially when it is small.

There's also the problem that we're currently applying the halos one
glyph at a time (just before each glyph is rendered), with the result
that subsequent halos overwrite part of the previous glyph, if the
chosen lineweight is too thick.

Another (upcoming) problem is when I render this type of text to a
Cairo [PDF/SVG/etc] surface: I don't think I want each piece of text
to actually be emitted to the backend twice, do I?.  I'm predicting
that if I did, users would end up selecting twice as much text in
their PDF output (for example).  Admittedly, I'm not sure what
actually should be in the PDF for this type of text, so I'm open to
possibilities...  :P

Anyways, if anyone has any suggestions/techniques they'd like to
share, I'd appreciate it!
Ian