How to get font to align on the ascender line instead of the baseline?

Question

I'm trying to get a font, SambhotaUnicode, to align on the ascender line, so that text reads evenly across the heads of the letters at different sizes. Another font, TibetanMachineUnicode, actually does this just fine. However I'm not sure why or where to start digging to update SambhotaUnicode to match the latter's beavhour. Using fontforge's tools to do a diff it does say there are different truetype instructions.

SambhotaUnicode (left, incorrect) vs. TibetanMachineUnicode (right, correct):

For context, I'm using LaTeX, and there are other limitations in it arround wrapping long blocks of text in boxes, hence it seems like adjusting the font might be the simplest and seemingly the most correct way to fix it.

Answer 1

After examining the two fonts in fontforge and FontLab, it appears that the letters are simply aligned differently.

The TibetanMachineUnicode aligns the top of the letters at y-axis 0, where as the SambhotaUnicode font is aligned to drop the bottom part of the letter slightly below 0.

SambhotaUnicode (left) vs. TibetanMachineUnicode (right):

Using fontforge as a test I moved one of the letters in SambhotaUnicode to y-axis 0, which appeared to work. However modifying a font like this seems to be non-trivial to get right and leaves you with a custom and unsupported font. So I'm still looking into seeing if I can do the adjustment directly in LaTeX for a better long term solution.