General description of the intrinsic behavior
The labels in a tikz picture are shifted (e.g. by above) exactly to the extreme of the letters in the labels, i.e. it takes the descender (see Wikipedia's entry for descender) of the letters into account like at the letter "g" (or the "p" of Sphinx).
Different aspect (why that question)
But then the following examples do not look symmetric anymore.
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\coordinate (leadl) at (1,0);
\coordinate (leadr) at (2,0);
\fill (leadl) circle[radius=2pt];
\fill (leadr) circle[radius=2pt];
\node[above] at (leadl) {left};
\node[above] at (leadr) {right};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
\documentclass[tikz]{standalone}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\coordinate (leadl) at (1,0);
\coordinate (leadr) at (2,0);
\fill (leadl) circle[radius=2pt];
\fill (leadr) circle[radius=2pt];
\node[below] at (leadl) {lelele};
\node[below] at (leadr) {rerere};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
Issue to be solved
What is the easiest way to work around this (in some cases wished) feature? I do not want to analyze every character in all nodes' labels that I am typing.
anchor=ascent
oranchor=descent
? I have not found these in the manual. For the case[below]
it would be necessary to anchor the ascent or add the font size to the base.