Figma needs baseline shift functionality

People have been complaining about this for years. I have to add ® and ™ to strings of text in my artboards. The superscript version of the character must be the same size as the rest of the text string, or it will not be vertically aligned properly with the rest of the text.

The ®™ symbols are much too large, especially in headlines, but if you reduce the font size of that character, it drops down too low and is no longer in the superscript position.

In Sketch or any other proper app, you can adjust the baseline of the specific character (baseline shift) so that you can re-align it properly.

You can EASILY accomplish this in CSS and create specific styling for the “sup” tag which handles this in code.

Why is it nearly impossible to replicate what is easy in any other app in Figma? I’ve seen people complaining about this since 2018, so I take that as an assumption that Figma will never fix this issue?

The only way to get a properly aligned and sized ® or ™ in a line of text is to create a separate text block and align it manually. And across an entire prototype that is a ridiculous solution.

3 Likes

Hey @ClassyUX, thank you for your feedback.
I do understand your frustration! I am going to forward this to the teams.

When you apply superscript/subscript to text, Figma tries to use any superscript/subscript glyphs provided by the font. If it isn’t provided, Figma draws a synthesized version by using the font’s standard version of the character, shrinking it, and positioning it accordingly.

I’be changed the category from “Ask the community” to “Share an idea” to other community members can leave their feedback and vote for it. This helps us roadmap future updates.

Thanks,
Gayani

Agreed. This is a basic type formatting feature that would be great to have. Being able to adjust the vertical placement of individual characters by increments of .1 pts (the tenth of a point), would allow our team to more accurately communicate in mockups to developers what we need our superscript and subscript characters to look like in the final piece.

Please address this ASAP! This has been a sore spot for a long time now. Yes I know there are hacks to get it to work but it’s not at all efficient especially when trying to limit the number of texts boxes and nested elements when building components. Every other software platform out there that handle text editing functions allows for this to be done quite easily. It’s odd to me that Figma has figured out Number styles that allows you to take advantage of Open Type features, but hasn’t cracked this yet.