Ofnuts, one of the great grandmasters in Gimpluggin' universe has delighted us, once again with a useful new python plug-in called "Outline Layer Contents". It's like one of the Layer Effects styles, stroke but better! At least considering this: You have 3 different join styles. Miter, Round and Bevel.

Thanks man.

Tested with Arial Heavy 150
Line Width 16, outside the border. (The other option is over the border.)
Miter limit 2, to prevent spikes. using 0 or 1 with miter join style turns the outline to bevel style.
I'm wondering why the other spike is taller. Big M is not completely symmetrical?

The spikes are actually from the angles under the M. The outline produced is like this (the white line is the actual text border):



I can't think of a good way to make sure this never happens, but you can always reduce the miter limit (2 is a bit excessive, 8 would have been enough).

Since your "M" looks symmetric, my hypothesis is that you did the outline on a rasterized layer, not on the original text layer. On the latter, the script uses the path from the text, while with a rasterized layer, it does an alpha-to-selection and select-to-path, and in that case the symmetry of anchors is far from guaranteed.

This said, nothing earth-shattering in the script, everything can be done manually in a few clicks.

Yeah, didn't realize the layer had been rasterized with layer to image size before running the plug-in.
Thanks for clarification, works perfectly.