I want display individual characters centralised inside a box so that I can create a sort of grid with them equally spaced - this would be like a centered baseline monospaced characterset.
I can't see how with lower case letters once can discover how much to shift them to get them central, although this can be achieved somewhat with caps.
Is there any way to make my own font up perhaps, and bundle that with the application?
You can usually get pretty close using methods of the Font class. Here's one way to do it. Other options include the TextLayout and GlyphVector classes.