How can I give TextEdit an outline?

[anda_skoa]

But then again I'm probably completely missunderstanding how QPainter and QTextEdit even relate to each other.

QPainter is just the low level drawing API, QTextEdit ultimately uses it to draw its content.

The QTextEdit widgets is a pretty versatile component due the text layout engine it uses.
This engine is QTextDocument. See QTextEdit::document().

It allows you to manipulate text very similar to a text processor, e.g. having different formats for different sections of text.

One of the involved classes, QTextCharFormat, allows to set the pen used to draw text outline. See QTextCharFormat::setTextOutline().

I haven't used this particular feature myself yet, but this could be what you are looking for.

Cheers,
_