I solved the issue of dealing with the way different devices place text strings using VCENTER. This is the logic to ensure your text string appears vertically centered. I used monkey.jungle excludeAnnotations and "has" logic to set flags to perform the skews. And a nested FOR loop to check the text string for the existence of any of the 20 descender characters. A pain, but necessary for the text to look nicely centered for one of my fields.
var skew = dc.getFontDescent(font)/2;
OLD EDGE DEVICES (like 520, 820, 1030, Explore):
If your text string does NOT have any descenders (meaning no y, j, ], etc)... then VCENTER does what you expect.
However, if you have descenders, you need to move your text string UP by the amount: skew
NEW EDGE DEVICES (1040, 1050):
If your text string does have descenders, then VCENTER does what you expect.
However, if it does NOT have any descenders, you need to move your text string DOWN by: skew
EDGE EXPLORE2:
If this has descenders or not, you always have to move your text string UP by: skew
There may be other devices that require special handling, but at least I now have the pattern to make it work.
