Launched: Faux superscript support

Many fonts don’t have super script and sub script support, so they’re disabled (at least all the font I need to use).

I know some fonts have built-in symbols for TM, SM, R, C, etc, but in many cases, they’re not superscripted or inconsistently so.

It would be great if Figma supports faux Super Script, where you can highlight any characters, make them smaller, and adjust the positioning. (similar to how our engineering friends would implement it using and CSS to fine tune)

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A lot of fonts don’t have this OpenType flag (which is used by Figma), but many still have the characters that can be typed manually: ¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰

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I sort of understand the desire to keep things Kosher, but this has been an issue for a while.

One member put it the best:

Also putting my hand up here for this need. As designers, we don’t always have control over what fonts our clients use, and this problem is something that comes up all the time.

https://spectrum.chat/figma/help/sub-and-superscript-not-working~b263d5bc-62ea-42a6-afc9-0b91426a7fdc

https://spectrum.chat/figma/general/superscript-and-subscript-still-not-working-a-year-later~85cfcb75-95fa-41f3-b035-d728544904d2

https://spectrum.chat/figma/help/sub-and-superscript-not-working~b263d5bc-62ea-42a6-afc9-0b91426a7fdc

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This is a massive +1 from me. Working in the healthcare sector, references are really important. I like the idea of keeping it ‘pure’, but it’s just not realistic if the rest of the web doesn’t work like that. Since Figma is built on web technologies, surely it can’t be hard to use cutting-edge markup techniques like <sup>?

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True. But support for reference symbols is rare (e.g. †, ‡, §, ‖, ¶).

Also, when working with scientific content it’s not uncommon to have multiple references at the end of a sentence, and you need to separate each of those with a comma (e.g. ‘1,2,3’). Unfortunately pretty much no font has a dedicated superscript comma character.

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I’m pretty sure it’s not rare, it’s non-existent. There are no unicode characters for that. Only the open type font feature can do it but I don’t think any fonts would include those characters in it. I know @Tom_Lowry worked on a private plugin for something like this, maybe it’s worth sharing, Tom?

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I work for a company that supports multiple brands that legally require for the creative to be both in french and english. Currently our english trademarks work fine, however it takes our team a lot of time to type set every trademark in FR as it has to be done manually.

I would love to see support from Figma in getting some sort of plug-in or function in the program to support forced super script!

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It doesn’t seem like there’s a solution coming from Figma any time soon, so we’ve started the process of creating a bespoke font (using FontSelf) with a wide range of superscript characters and weights. Not ideal and seems excessive, but will solve it for us until there is enough support for Figma to build this in.

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If you could publish your creation in the future, that would be awesome!

I work for a healthcare agency and references are a HUGE deal. We are currently on the fence between XD and FIGMA and as much as we are liking FIGMA, this simple thing is a dealbreaker.

XD supports superscripts on any/all characters, it’s not a font solution.

Please! Fix this for all of us in the healthcare, legal and scientific fields. It’s truly a dealbreaker and will force us to XD.

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Hi, does anyone solved this problem? I’m working for a huge medical company and we must have superscripts in the design. We can make footnotes with numbers but not “,” between numbers. Now we probably move to XD or Sketch because of this.

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Hi Pierre, we put together a custom font (based on Inter) with three weights that includes a number of common reference characters (including commas). Below is a link to the cheatsheet, which also includes links to download the fonts.

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Thank you, Tony! You made my day, my company and my client more than happy! :slight_smile:

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Hi all!

I’m in the same situation as many of you as I work with healthcare clients and I found a solution until Figma gets this sorted.

@Tom_Lowry created a plugin for this: https://github.com/thomas-lowry/superscript

I found that adding new symbols to the code.js file works wonders if you need more.

Try it out!

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+1. The company I work for must have a TM after it’s name in every instance.

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Hi Tony. Is there any chance you could add a ‘TM’ to that list of characters?

Alot of the font won’t superscript characters such as comma’s, this is causing huge issues for my healthcare client work, please sort this out asap otherwise I’ll have to make the switch to AdobeXD.

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We’ll get a TM symbol added to the font and update here.

@Tracy_O_Callaghan you’re not referring specifically to the font we created are you? Commas def work if you have that font selected.

@Tony_Allsopp amazing I hadn’t realise that, thanks so much!! :pray:

Trying to superscript MD and it totally not doing it. Total deal breaker.

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