Superscript and Subscript Generator
Raised and lowered characters for places with no formatting.
Everything runs inside your browser. Your files never leave your device.
Input
Result
Ask about Superscript and Subscript Generator
Questions about what this tool does, which option to pick, or what it can and cannot handle.
The question you type here is sent to an AI provider to be answered — your files and whatever you put in the tool above are not, and the assistant cannot see them. Answers are generated and can be wrong. The tool itself is not guessing: it runs deterministic code on your device.
About the Superscript and Subscript Generator
Raised and lowered characters have a genuine job to do outside decoration. A footnote marker, a squared metre, an ordinal ending, the formula for water — all of them need a character sitting above or below the line, and plain-text fields offer no way to produce one.
Unicode covers this, but unevenly, and the unevenness is the main thing to understand here. Superscript digits are complete and have been supported for decades, which is why squared and cubed appear correctly almost everywhere. Superscript letters are nearly complete: every lowercase letter has a raised form except q, which was never encoded and comes through unchanged.
Subscript is far worse off. It has all ten digits, which is what chemical formulas need and why they work. Its letters are a scattered handful — roughly a, e, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, v and x — encoded for specific notational purposes and never completed. There is no subscript b, c, d, f, g, q, w, y or z, so a word written in subscript will come out as a mixture of lowered and ordinary letters. The tool counts how many were left behind and says so, rather than quietly producing something that looks broken.
Capital letters have no raised or lowered forms at all in the ranges used here, so uppercase input is mapped to the lowercase equivalents where one exists.
These characters carry meaning, which is an argument for using them properly. A squared symbol in a measurement is read correctly by assistive software; a whole word in raised letters is not.
How to use it
- 1Type what you need raised or lowered — a footnote number, a formula, an ordinal.
- 2Take the superscript row for anything above the line, the subscript row for anything below it.
- 3Copy the row you want.
- 4Paste it into the field that has no formatting controls.
- 5Look at the note: it counts the letters with no raised or lowered form, and there are more than you would expect.
Questions
- Why is there no subscript for most letters?
- They were never encoded. The subscript letters that exist were added for particular uses in mathematics and phonetics, one at a time, and the set was never rounded out into a full alphabet. Roughly nine lowercase letters have no lowered form at all, which is why subscript words come out mixed.
- Which letter is missing from superscript?
- The letter q, and only that one. Every other lowercase letter has a raised form. It is a small enough gap that most text is unaffected, but a word containing a q will show one full-size letter among the raised ones.
- Is this the right way to write a chemical formula?
- For a plain-text field, yes, and it is one of the few genuinely good uses of this whole family. The subscript digits are complete, well supported and semantically correct, so a formula written with them reads properly and is announced sensibly by assistive software.
- Can I use it for footnote markers?
- Yes. The raised digits are the most reliably rendered characters in this entire group, dating back to the earliest days of the standard, and they display correctly even on old devices and in monospace terminals.