[XeTeX] Drop-shadows with outline fonts in XeTeX ?

[Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)]

For my sins, I have been commissioned to do some electronic
sign writing for a soon-to-open family-owned restaurant in
Islington.  For the previous incarnation of the business, I did
this in Corel Paintshop Pro V10, and was doing the same on
this occasion until I realised that Corel rasterises the image when
saving and even when printing to PDF.  As the widest sign is 7 metres
long, this would result in unimaginably large images files or
excessive blockiness in the glyph edges, neither of which are
really acceptable.

So, as the signs consist solely of text, I wondered whether it
might be possible to re-engineer them in XeTeX, but I would
like block shadow on the words "Thai-An" (see attached).  Is
this possible using XeTeX, and if so, how can it best be achieved ?

A plain XeTeX solution would be preferred to a XeLaTeX one,
but the latter would be acceptable if no-one knows how to achieve
it in plain XeTeX.

Philip Taylor
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