vertical alignment of text

Hi all, Is there a way to align text vertically so that the

    > characters sit on a continuous line ? When I do text(.5,
    > .5, 'abc', verticalalignment='center') text(.6, .5, 'pqr',
    > verticalalignment='center') both words are not aligned
    > since the bars of p and q push the text upwards. I get
    > similar problems with 'top' and 'bottom' alignment.

Sadly not. We need to add an additional alignment flag to support
this. Currently, we align by the bounding box rather than the text
baseline.

JDH