Small Text Generator

How to use the small text generator

1. Type or paste your text in the box, or press Example to load a sample sentence.
2. Read the three results below the box: Small caps, Superscript and Subscript. They update as you type.
3. Press Copy next to the style you want, then paste it into your message, username, bio or document.
4. To undo small text you received, set Direction to Fancy → plain text and paste it in; the tool shows the plain version with its own Copy button.

The page does not change fonts. It swaps each letter for a different Unicode character that happens to look small, which is why the result keeps its look when pasted into apps that do not allow formatting.

The three styles and their gaps

Unicode was never designed with a complete small alphabet. The small capitals come from the IPA Extensions, Phonetic Extensions and Latin Extended-D blocks, which exist for phonetic notation; the superscript and subscript letters are modifier letters from Phonetic Extensions and Superscripts and Subscripts. Each style has gaps, and the tool shows them honestly rather than mixing in look-alikes from other alphabets.

Everything else passes through untouched: spaces, line breaks, punctuation, emoji and accented letters such as é or ñ. Small caps also leave digits as normal digits, so H2O becomes ʜ2ᴏ.

Unicode does contain a few more characters than the tool uses, for example a small capital Q (U+A7AF) and, in recent versions, a superscript q and subscript w, y and z. They are left out on purpose: many fonts still lack them, and a letter that shows as an empty box on the reader’s screen is worse than a plain one.

Worked examples

These come from the tool itself:

The best results come from matching the style to the text. Small caps suit words and short phrases. Superscript works for almost any word and for exponents such as E = mc2 → ᴱ ⁼ ᵐᶜ². Subscript is most useful for chemical formulas and indexes, where only the digits need to drop: CO2 → CO₂, H2O → H₂O. To lower just the numbers in a formula, type the letters in capitals, since capitals stay as they are.

Converting small text back to plain text

With Direction set to Fancy → plain text, the tool maps small capitals back to their letters and uses Unicode normalization (NFKC) for superscripts and subscripts. The same mode also undoes the other styles on this site, such as bold, cursive and upside-down text.

ᴴ²ᴼ ᵃⁿᵈ ˣ²   →  H2O and x2
ʜᴇʟʟᴏ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ  →  hello world
Sₘₐₗₗ ₜₑₓₜ    →  Small text

Two things do not survive the round trip. Small caps come back in lowercase, because the small capital for R and for r is the same character. Superscript capitals that had to use the small form come back lowercase as well: Read the FAQ becomes ᴿᵉᵃᵈ ᵗʰᵉ ᶠᴬQ, which converts back to Read the fAQ. Normalization is applied only to characters the styles produce, so ordinary characters in the pasted text stay as typed: ˢᵐᵃˡˡ ½ file comes back as small ½ file. Superscript and subscript digits are style output, though, so a ² that was in the text before always becomes 2.

Small caps formatting vs Unicode small caps

If you are writing in a word processor, use its own small caps formatting instead of this tool. In Microsoft Word, select the text and press Ctrl+Shift+K on Windows or Command+Shift+K on a Mac. Formatted small caps keep the real letters underneath, so spelling check, search and copy-paste into other documents keep working, and the formatting covers every letter, including Q and X. More editing shortcuts are in the keyboard shortcuts guide.

Unicode small caps are the answer when there is no formatting at all: Discord messages, gamer tags and in-game chat, social media bios, comments and display names. In a game such as Minecraft, whether the letters show up depends on the font the game uses; if a letter appears as a box, that font does not have it. The guide to bold and italic text on social media explains the same trade-off for the other styles.

Before you paste it somewhere

• Keep it short. A username, a heading in a bio or a single phrase reads well. Whole paragraphs of small text are hard to read, and people who search for your words will not find them.
• Check the length. Each small letter replaces one normal letter, so ʜᴇʟʟᴏ is 5 characters, the same as hello. If a bio or username has a limit, paste the result into the character counter first.
• Want capitals rather than small letters? For normal capital letters with no special characters, use the uppercase converter. For every decorative style side by side, including circled and fullwidth letters, try the fancy text generator.

Questions