I have the following:
The sentence goes like $A_{\mathrm{row}}^\beta$ and $A_{\mathrm{col}}^\beta$, bloop!
And the result looks like this:
Because col has the letter l, the subscript gets some additional space. However, this is not needed in many cases. How can I enforce that the col-variant does not get extra space in the subscript?
Ideally, the same box dimensions are used as the row-variant, where I allow overflow on the top of the box.
I have attempted adding a parbox of height \heightof{\ensuremath{\mathrm{row}}}, but this is not aware that it is in a subscript, and will use the default size.

_{\smash{\mathrm{col}}– David Carlisle Mar 18 '22 at 12:28