How can I ignore descenders for vertical text alignment?

Question

If text is vertically aligned, its actual shape is taken into account. Usually, this is a problem if you want small pieces of text (such as titles) aligned and one of them doesn’t have a descender, which can be solved by using \strut (and probably some other ways).

My problem is the opposite: I want to use all caps for some titles, which are then placed into boxes (for a poster). Usually, the titles are aligned such that both the baseline and the cap height have equal distance to the respective border of the box – which is good for all caps. However, one of my titles contains a Q which has a considerable descender in my font of choice. This descender is then taken into account for the vertical alignment shifting the title upwards (see example below) – which is not good.

How can I fix this?

I found this question, but I failed to translate the solutions to my problem.

Example

Here is a minimal example for my specific problem (using BAPoster):

\documentclass[a0paper]{baposter}

% To avoid errors:
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage[variant=uk]{english}

\begin{document}
\begin{poster}{
    headershade=plain,
    headerfont=\MakeUppercase
    }{}{}{}{}

\begin{posterbox}[name=exampleA]{good}\end{posterbox}
\begin{posterbox}[below=exampleA]{awquard}\end{posterbox}

\end{poster}
\end{document}

This results in the following:

(I know that the colours are horrible; it’s just a minimal example.)

Answer 1

I would use the \smash command, which should suit you. Please mind that I manually adjusted "how much" to smash in order to have consistent kerning among the letters. You could have to fine tune it yourself

\documentclass[a0paper]{baposter}

% To avoid errors:
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage[variant=uk]{english}

\begin{document}
\begin{poster}{
    headershade=plain,
    headerfont=\MakeUppercase
    }{}{}{}{}

\begin{posterbox}[name=exampleA]{awqward}\end{posterbox}
\begin{posterbox}[below=exampleA]{\smash{awQwa}rd}\end{posterbox}

\end{poster}
\end{document}