Small Text Generator

How to use the small text generator

This small text generator, also called a tiny text generator, turns ordinary text into small letters you can copy and paste anywhere that accepts Unicode text. It writes your words in three styles at once, so you can pick the one that looks best.

1. Type or paste your text into the box. The small caps, superscript and subscript versions appear as you type.
2. Read the notes under each style. Letters that Unicode has no small form for are kept as typed and marked, so you can see what will stay full size.
3. Press Copy under the style you want, or Copy all three, and paste the text where you need it.
4. To undo it, open Back to plain text and paste the small text to get ordinary letters back.

The Options under the results change how capitals and accented letters are handled, turn on newer characters, and switch superscript and subscript to numbers only, for chemical formulas such as H₂O or powers such as m². Download .txt saves all three styles in one UTF-8 text file. The Character map tab lists every small letter with its code point; select one to copy just that character.

Small caps, superscript and subscript

There is no “small font” in plain text, and small text is not a font. What a small text generator does is replace each letter with a different character that happens to look like a small version of it. Unicode, the standard that gives every character a number, has three such sets, and none of them was made for decoration.

Small caps: ᴀʙᴄ

Small capitals are capital letters drawn at the height of lowercase letters. Unicode has them in its phonetic blocks, where they mark particular sounds: the Unicode Standard notes that in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, “small capitalization … means voicelessness of a normally voiced sound.” As small text, small caps look like a quiet, even line of capitals, and they are the most complete set: 25 of the 26 letters exist. A small caps generator is the best choice when you want whole words to look small.

Superscript: ᵃᵇᶜ

Superscript letters sit high, like an exponent. Most are modifier letters from phonetic transcription, where a raised letter marks a short or transitional sound, and the superscript digits are used for tone marks and math. A superscript generator covers every lowercase letter (q only among the newer characters) and most capitals, so it is the second most complete style. It is also the one to use for footnote marks and powers: x², 10⁻³.

Subscript: ₐₑₒ

Subscript characters sit low, below the line. Unicode has all the subscript digits, which makes chemical formulas like H₂O and CO₂ the classic use, but only some letters, taken from phonetic and mathematical notation. A subscript generator is ideal for chemical formulas and indexes like xₙ, and the weakest choice for whole words.

Which small letters exist

The counts below come straight from the Unicode Character Database 18.0, the version released in September 2026. “With newer characters” includes the ones added in Unicode 14.0 or later, which many devices cannot show yet (see below).

What happens to the gaps:

• Small caps X becomes a lowercase x, which is the same shape at the same height, and the note under the style says so.
• Superscript capitals that do not exist (X, Y and Z, plus C, F, Q and S while newer characters are off) use the small superscript letter: ˣ, ʸ, ᶻ. Or choose Small forms for every letter to make every capital small.
• Subscript capitals do not exist at all, so a capital uses its lowercase subscript form where there is one: H becomes ₕ.
• Everything else, including subscript b, c, d, f, g and q, digits in small caps, punctuation and emoji, is kept exactly as typed and marked in the preview.

Many generators fill these gaps with lookalikes from other alphabets, such as a Greek or Canadian Aboriginal syllabics letter that resembles a small q. This one does not: a lookalike is a different letter with a different meaning, and it reads as nonsense to a screen reader or a search box. A hyphen is the one swap it makes, because Unicode has a superscript and a subscript minus but no hyphen, and it is listed when it happens.

Worked examples

Each row shows what the generator makes with the default options, unless the row says otherwise. Characters that stay full size are listed in the last column.

In “Café au lait” the accent rides along as a combining mark (é becomes ᴇ followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT), and the superscript capital C is replaced by the small ᶜ because the capital form is a newer character. The superscript in the last row is how you would write square meters, m², and the subscript is the formula for water.

Why some small letters show as boxes

A character only shows up if a font on the reader’s device has a drawing of it. If none does, the reader sees an empty box, a box with a code in it, or a question mark, and nothing you do on your side can fix that. The older small letters were added between Unicode 1.1 (1993) and Unicode 11.0 (2018), so fonts have had years to include them, although a few fonts still lack some. The ones below are recent, so the generator leaves them out unless you turn on Use newer characters, and marks them with a dashed underline when you do.

If the table above shows boxes on your screen, your device is a good example of the problem. Fonts catch up with new Unicode versions over months and years, unevenly from one device to the next, so a character that looks fine to you may still be a box for the person reading it.

Accented letters, emoji and other characters

The generator reads your text the way you see it, one user-perceived character at a time, following the grapheme cluster rules of Unicode Standard Annex #29. A family emoji built from several code points, a flag, a skin-tone emoji or a letter with two accents is one unit, and it is never cut in half.

Unicode has no small caps é, so an accented letter is split into its base letter and its accent (Unicode Normalization Form D) and the base letter is converted. You choose what happens to the accent: keep it as a combining mark (the default; some fonts draw it at full height above a small letter), drop it, or leave the letter as typed. Small capitals also exist for æ, œ, ð and ł, and the generator uses them. Letters from other alphabets, digits in small caps, punctuation and emoji have no small form in these sets, so they stay as they are and are listed under the style.

Small text and accessibility

Because small text is made of unusual characters, not formatting, assistive technology sees the characters, not the letters they resemble. A screen reader may read each one by its Unicode name, such as “latin letter small capital h” or “modifier letter small h”, may read some as plain letters, or may skip them, depending on the screen reader and its settings. A UK disability charity’s guide puts it plainly: screen readers “may skip them entirely or read something irrelevant to the user.”

• Keep important words in plain text: your name, a link, a date, a price, anything people must read or find.
• Use small text for decoration, and do not write a whole message in it.
• Tell people what it says when the small text carries meaning, for example in plain text next to it.

The generator itself labels every output box and every button in the character map with the character’s name and code point, so you can use it with a screen reader. It cannot change how the text is read once you paste it somewhere else.

Small text or real formatting?

The Unicode Standard says the preferred way to write superscripted letters or digits “is by style or markup in rich text”, and keeps the superscript and subscript characters mainly for compatibility and for phonetics. If you are writing a document, an e-mail with formatting, or a web page, formatting is better than these characters:

• Word processors have superscript, subscript and small caps formatting that works for every letter and every language.
• Web pages have the HTML sup and sub elements for footnotes, exponents and formulas, and the CSS property font-variant-caps: small-caps for true small capitals. The HTML standard reserves sup and sub for “typographical conventions with specific meanings”, not decoration.
• Plain-text places, such as a profile bio, a username or a text message, cannot hold formatting. That is where Unicode small text is the only option, with the limits above.

Search is a second reason to prefer formatting. Superscript and subscript characters have a compatibility decomposition, so software that normalizes text to NFKC, as described in Unicode Standard Annex #15, turns ᵗᵉˣᵗ back into text. Small capitals have no decomposition at all, so no Unicode normalization links ᴛᴇxᴛ to the word text.

Turning small text back into plain text

The Back to plain text tab reverses the conversion. It knows every small capital, superscript and subscript character this generator can make, including the newer ones, and changes each back to its letter, digit or sign. Small capitals come back as lowercase letters, since Unicode does not record which case they stood for; superscript capitals come back as capitals; the superscript and subscript minus signs come back as hyphens; and accents are recombined, so ᴄᴀꜰᴇ́ becomes café. It also changes back other styled text people paste: mathematical bold, italic, script, fraktur, double-struck, sans-serif and monospace letters and digits (𝐁𝐨𝐥𝐝 becomes Bold), circled, parenthesized and squared letters and numbers (ⓒⓘⓡⓒⓛⓔ becomes circle, ⑫ becomes 12), and fullwidth letters and digits (Ｆｕｌｌ becomes Full). These have compatibility decompositions, so it uses NFKC normalization for them, one character at a time; the few with none, like 🅐 and ❶, are changed by their Unicode names. Fullwidth punctuation is changed only in text with no Chinese, Japanese or Korean in it, where it is ordinary punctuation, and a character shown as an emoji, like 🅰️, is left alone. Anything else, including ordinary text, other compatibility characters like ½ and ™, and ordinal indicators like the º in 1º, is left exactly as it is.

Private by design

• Nothing is uploaded. The conversion happens in your browser. The page’s Content-Security-Policy allows connections only back to this site, and the generator makes none.
• Your text is not stored. Only your options, such as how to handle capitals and accents, are kept in your browser’s local storage under one key.
• No account and no cookies. Once the page has loaded, the generator works offline.

Sources

• Unicode Character Database 18.0.0: UnicodeData.txt (every character, name and compatibility decomposition) and DerivedAge.txt (the version that added each character). Every code point on this page and in the generator comes from these files.
• The Unicode Standard, Version 18.0, §22.4 Superscript and Subscript Symbols and §7.1.6 Phonetic Extensions: what these characters are for.
• Unicode 18.0.0, released September 16, 2026, and Enumerated Versions of the Unicode Standard for the year of each version.
• Unicode Standard Annex #15, Unicode Normalization Forms: NFD, NFKC and compatibility decompositions.
• Unicode Standard Annex #29, Unicode Text Segmentation: grapheme clusters.
• WHATWG HTML Living Standard, the sub and sup elements.
• W3C, CSS Fonts Module Level 4: font-variant-caps and W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, Success Criterion 1.3.1 Info and Relationships.
• Scope for Business (Tuke H, 2021). How special characters and symbols affect screen reader accessibility.

Reviewed by microplugins · Last updated October 2026