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Small Text Generator

Welcome! This website is (quite obviously) a small text generator. It's fairly self-explanatory - you put some text in the first box, and it'll convert it into three different small text "fonts" for you. To be clear, they're not actually fonts. You can tell they're not fonts because it's possible to copy and paste the small text generated into other websites (like your Instagram bio, a Tumblr post, etc.). You wouldn't be able to do that if it was just a font. So how is this copy and paste stuff possible? Well, to answer that question, we need to learn a little bit about Unicode.

Unicode

Unicode is an international not-for-profit organisation that started in the 1980s as an effort to "unify" the "codes" for textual characters used in the computing industry. By "code", I just mean a number. Computers only understand numbers, and so you need to tell the computer which number refers to the letter "a", which one refers to the letter "b", etc. so that you can visualise them on a computer screen (otherwise you'd be reading ones and zeros right now). So the problem in the 1980s was that there wasn't a universally agreed-upon set of "rules" for which number refers to which character, and so every programmer was writing their own set of rules, and whenever their programs interacted with programs written by other programmers, they'd need to make specially designed "translators" to allow the programs to communicate. Unicode sought to solve this by creating an international standard - meaning that everyone would be using the same number-to-letter "rule book".

Okay, so how does this relate to generating small text? Well, as it turned out, there were a bunch of people that weren't too interested in Unicode. They had specific character requirements that Unicode hadn't accounted for in their initial specification. So in order to get programmers and organisations to adopt the Unicode standard faster, Unicode began incorperating a bunch of weird symbols and rules that those people needed for their applications, and thus Unicode's full character set exploded to include include tens of thousands of different symbols, for many languages, and many arcane legacy systems.

Along the way, it picked up a set of symbols which can be used to emulate "small caps" (an alphabet of small capital letters), and a somewhat incomplete set of subscript and superscript characters. So the small text letters that you see in the output box above are just a few of the 130,000+ symbols that are specified in the Unicode standard - just like the symbols that you're reading right now.

So while you might have thought that you were looking for small text fonts, it turns out that you're actually looking for small text symbols (or characters). People just assume it must be a font because they look different to normal characters - but so do emojis! And they're not a font - they're also characters in the Unicode standard. And that's pretty cool, because it means you can copy and paste the small text that this site generates into your Instagram bio, Twitter posts, Discord messages, Tumblr blog posts, YouTube comments, and just about anywhere else!

Small Caps

Small caps have a long typographical history. For the past several hundred years, they have been used in the print medium to create a aesthetic distinction (e.g. by linguists) or as a substitute for a long string of capital letters which may appear jarring to the the reader (e.g. for long acronyms). Check out the small caps Wikipedia page for more info.

As you might have noticed, the small caps Unicode alphabet is probably the most "complete" of the three glyph sets that the engine behind this website uses. The Q, X and S letters aren't quite right, but they're passable.

If you're trying to produce small caps with CSS (within your HTML document), you can use this code:

<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Testing 123</span>
<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Testing 123</span>

You could instead use the small text characters generated by this website, but you'd be better off using CSS because the rendering will be better. But often you don't have access to HTML tags, and so that's where a generator like this might come in handy.

Like I said earlier, people often think that the text produced by this generator is a small caps font, when actually it converts your text into a set of small caps characters or "glyphs". However, if you're actually looking for a font that supports small caps, then you'll be happy to know that most fonts do support small caps in at least an "inferred" manner. That is to say, if the small caps unicode characters aren't explicitely in the font, then the renderer (the browser, word processor, etc.) should be able to automatically scale the regular Latin characters to create symbols that look like small caps. Of course, these won't look quite as good as if the small capitals were actually created by the type designer.

Here's the full small caps alphabet used by this generator:

ᴀʙᴄᴅᴇꜰɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘǫʀsᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ

Superscript

A small number of superscript characters were introduced to Unicode for general usage in math, phonetics, and related fields. It is useful for professionals in these fields to be able to write their equations and other communications in situations where no markup language like HTML or LaTeX is available (e.g. in messaging systems).

Original, only 3 superscript characters were included in Unicode: ¹²³. These were followed by the rest of the numerals, and some superscript symbols that are useful for math: ⁺⁻⁼⁽⁾ⁿ. Following those, we got most of the Latin alphabet except "q". If you use the generator you'll see that we're using a different symbol as a substitute. It's quite strange that the Unicode working group decided to leave out the "q" symbol, but the most likely reason is that it wasn't intended to be a subscript alphabet in the first place - rather, each subscript character was introduced to fulfill a separate purpose, and the fact that there's nearly a full alphabet is just a coincidence. Still, it'd be nice if they just "filled that one in".

If you're using HTML, there's no need to generate superscript text using the above fields, because you can create properly-rendered superscript letters with the sup tag:

<sup>Example</sup>

Easy! For the rest of use, we'll have to put up with "ᵠ" as our superscript "q" for now. If you find a better unicode character for "q", please let us know!.

Here's the full superscript alphabet used by this generator:

ᵃᵇᶜᵈᵉᶠᵍʰᶦʲᵏˡᵐⁿᵒᵖᵠʳˢᵗᵘᵛʷˣʸᶻ

Subscript

The introduction of subscript characters into Unicode followed a very similar path to the subscript characters, except that since they aren't used as often across all industries, we're quite a few characters short of a full alphabet. Hopefully Unicode will give us the rest of the required subscript characters at some point (I'd be happy to swap a few emojis to for the rest of this alphabet).

Here's the full subscript alphabet used by this generator:

ₐᵦ𝒸𝒹ₑ𝒻𝓰ₕᵢⱼₖₗₘₙₒₚᵩᵣₛₜᵤᵥ𝓌ₓᵧ𝓏

As you can see, we've had to fill in some gaps with some other small letters from the Unicode spec. If you really want to send that tweet with pure subscript text, then you'll have to try to avoid B, C, D, F, G, Q, W, and Z. Quite a challenge!

On Reddit

Reddit uses a particular flavor of "Markdown" to convert the plain-text user comments into comments that can have bold, italics, and other formatting like superscript. Here's how you add superscript text to your reddit comment:

This text will be normal^(and this text is super script)

It was once possible to add superscript text to the superscript text so it would keep going higher and smaller, but this seems to have been disallowed in the new version of reddit. If your superscript text is only one word long (i.e. it has no spaces), then you don't need the brackets:

1000 = 10^3

Tiny Letters

Perhaps some of the smallest letters in the Unicode specification so far are the "superscript small cap" letters - yep, that's right, small caps and superscript at the same time. Unfortunately, we are not even close to having a full alphabet of these characters these. Here's the full list: ᶦ ᶧ ᶫ ᶰ ʶ ᶸ. I think the best you could do with that is perhaps an "I love u" acronym thing: ᶦᶫᶸ. But for now it looks like you'll have to settle with normal small caps (or other tiny text) for your Instagram bio, Tweets and whatever else.

Instagram and Social Media

One final note about using small text on social media: Some websites have blocked the use of certain ranges of Unicode characters within certain areas. If you find that you're not able to use these small characters in your username, or your bio, or your posts, then this may be the reason. Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about that, because the website owners get to decide on what textual content is allowed on their platform. It's acually possible to "abuse" the Unicode standard in some ways to produce glitchy text that perhaps the website owner doesn't want, and so they block a bunch of those "problem characters". You'll likely find that most of the big sites (like Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) do allow you to use most special characters in at least your posts or bios because they need to allow for non-English-speaking users who actually need to use those special symbols as part of their language.

Any way, we hope this small text generator was useful to you! ʰᵃᵛᵉ ᶠᵘⁿ ᵐᵃᵏᶦⁿᵍ ˢᵐᵃˡˡ ˡᵉᵗᵗᵉʳˢᵎ ٩( ᐛ )و