Arial font baseline for letters 'i' and 'L'

Question

I am attempting to use the uarial font in latex. But the vertical alignment of characters appears to be off. If

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{uarial}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}

\begin{document}
\Huge{tial}
\end{document}

Produces the following:

Notice that the letters 'i' and 'l' have a different baseline than do 't' and 'a'. Is there a way to adjust this? That is not a feature of Arial

Answer 1

I don't think that uarial is a good choice. It is a rather curious mix between Arial and Helvetica. As you can see in the following picture the "C", "t" and "a" are from Helvetica, while the "G" and "R" is from arial. Also as you discovered the metrics are not really good. It is naturally possible to correct this by manipulating the tfm, but I don't think that it is worth the trouble.

%needs lualatex or xelatex   
\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Arial}
\setsansfont{TeX Gyre Heros}
\begin{document}
\Huge
CGRtial  (Arial)\par
{\sffamily CGRtial} (Helvetica/TeX Gyre Heros)\par
\fontencoding{T1}\fontfamily{ua1}\selectfont CGRtial (uarial)
\end{document}