Small Text Generator: Small Caps, Superscript and Subscript

The table compares the three styles on the things that decide whether your text will come out whole. "Letters available" counts the 26 letters of the alphabet. Our converter maps capitals to lowercase forms where a style has no capitals, so typing in capitals never breaks the output, but it does change the look.

Small caps is the most complete for words. Superscript is the only one with both full digits and most capitals. Subscript is mostly useful for numbers and short labels, because nine letters have no subscript form at all.

When a style has no form for a letter, or has one that phones can’t draw, the generator leaves the plain letter in place. That is the honest option: the alternative, used by some tools, is to swap in a look-alike from another alphabet, such as a Greek phi for q, without telling you the real character exists. That changes the meaning of the character and reads as a different letter to search engines and screen readers.

Here is the full list, checked character by character against our style engine. If a word you need contains one of these letters, pick a style that has it, or rephrase.

For a bio line, a username tag or a caption you want to read as words, small caps is the safest choice: 24 letters, every one at the same height, so the line looks even. ᴏꜰꜰɪᴄɪᴀʟ ᴀᴄᴄᴏᴜɴᴛ reads cleanly; only q and x stand out.

For an exponent, a footnote marker or a trademark-style tag in plain text, use superscript: x², footnote¹, ᵀᴹ. Note that ™ already exists as its own character (U+2122, TRADE MARK SIGN), and it is usually tidier than two superscript capitals.

For chemistry and indices, use subscript on the digits only. Converting a whole formula lowercases the element symbols: "H2O" becomes ₕ₂ₒ. Type H, paste ₂, type O, and you get H₂O with the capitals intact. The subscript generator page goes through formulas one by one.

On 2026-10-27 we checked every output character of these three styles against the fonts that ship with macOS 26.5.1 and against Android's system fonts listed in AOSP's fonts.xml. The method is a character-map lookup: a character counts as drawable if at least one font on the platform contains it.

All three passed on both platforms: 24 of 24 small-caps characters, 54 of 54 superscript characters and 27 of 27 subscript characters. That means a reader on either system should see letters rather than empty boxes. It does not tell you how a particular app styles them, and Windows was not part of this measurement.

Size and alignment do vary. The superscript letters come from several Unicode blocks, so fonts often draw ᵃ, ⁱ and ⁿ at slightly different heights; the mismatch is a font design issue, not a broken character.

Most "it didn't work" reports come down to the gaps above meeting a real word. These are the cases you are most likely to hit, with the actual output from the generator.

There are three practical fixes. Switch style for that word: "quiet" has no drawable small q in any style, but "silent" converts fully in small caps (ꜱɪʟᴇɴᴛ) and superscript (ˢⁱˡᵉⁿᵗ). Convert only part of the text: paste the small letters into the middle of plain text, as with H₂O. Or accept the plain letter and keep it lowercase, which hides the gap best in small caps, where q sits at nearly the same height as ᴜ and ɪ.

If the output shows empty boxes instead of letters, the problem is the reader's fonts rather than the small text generator, and our guide to fancy text showing as boxes covers that case.

If you are writing in Word, Google Docs or Pages, these characters are the wrong tool. Real formatting keeps the letters as normal text, so spell check, search and copy all keep working, and every letter is available, q included. Word processors have their own superscript and subscript formatting for exactly this.

Our guides to the superscript shortcut and the subscript shortcut collect each app's documented keys in one table. Use this tool where formatting does not exist: profile fields, game names, chat apps without markdown and plain-text forms.

None of these characters were added for decoration. The small capitals sit in IPA Extensions, Phonetic Extensions and Latin Extended-D, blocks that hold letters for phonetic transcription. The superscript letters are mostly modifier letters from the same phonetic tradition, plus the Superscripts and Subscripts block that carries the digits, signs, ⁱ and ⁿ.

Unicode encodes a character when a writing system or notation needs it. Phonetic notation needed some small capitals and some raised letters and never needed others, so the sets came out uneven. Some letters were encoded apart from the rest of their set: the small capital q (ꞯ, U+A7AF) sits in Latin Extended-D and the superscript q (U+107A5) in Latin Extended-F, and fonts have not all caught up. Our measurement found ꞯ in macOS fonts but not in Android’s, and the superscript q in neither. Small-capital x and subscript b, c, d, f, g, q, w, y and z are not encoded at all. Our generator shows you the gap rather than covering it up.