Cartoon like text outline, best approach?

I am trying to figure out which method is the best (from a performance perspective) for writing player scores and bonus values with a cartoonish GUI text that has a black outline.

Approach #1:

The famous 4+1 or 8+1 overdraw where the first are the outline, displaced from center and then the last one in center in textcolor.

Approach #2:

Render all the letters in Photoshop as a texture with alpha and then build our own Guitext writer.

Approeach #3:

Try to look for a shader that does the work. Toonshader kinda thing, and then make the text with flat 3D objects and an extra camera (that only clears on depth).

My question is therefore, whats the most used way (if any of these) or why not use them?

I am looking for a simple way of showing less than 30 characters at a time. Like:

  • Life x5
  • Bonus 123456
  • Items 14 / 50

When you import a font into Unity (as a non-dynamic font) it creates a font material and font texture. Couldn’t you just take the texture and modify it in Photoshop to replace the existing letters with your cartoon versions? That way you could use all of the existing Unity framework without having to write anything from scratch.