How I do TYPE a superscript letter or number in Apple MAIL?

Since Apple Mail does not natively support superscript and subscript, I decided to see if I could write an Apple Shortcut that would allow me to select the text for either treatment and apply either of the preceding baseline changes to it in Mail. Preferably retaining its font and color properties. And drive it from a list box offering one a choice of the baseline effect.

What I came up with has this workflow:

• Copy the text to receive the baseline treatment to the clipboard
• Press the keyboard shortcut (shift + cmd + B) to launch the Shortcut application
  • Select choice of superscript or subscript
• Click back in the Mail compose window and paste from the clipboard.
• The selected characters change their baseline retaining font characteristics.

You can click here to receive a prompt asking if you want to install the Apple Shortcut named Set Baseline Text. When you do, there will be no coding or other installation requirements, and the keyboard shortcut should be sufficient to run it. A dialog will appear if the Shortcut is run and there is nothing on the clipboard.

The Shortcut is written in AppleScript/Objective-C and is a port from earlier Shortcuts using Swift to do the same thing. Not everyone has Xcode or the command line tools installed which drove writing the current solution.

Tested: Apple Mail on Sonoma 14.5

You set conditions that don't allow anyone to provide you with the correct answer.

Apple Mail is not a word processing application so it does not provide any built-in means, by its settings or otherwise, to provide Font > Baseline > superscript or subscript text promotions. In its Settings, even Pages will only optionally perform automatic superscript promotion of numeric suffixes, not text strings.

GMak wrote:

How I do TYPE a superscript letter or number in Apple MAIL? Restarting this question as it wasn't answered before... The question is NOT "how do I insert a symbol into Apple Mail?" or "how do I copy and paste a superscript from another application into Mail?" or "How do I write a superscript on a Mac?" The question, just to be clear, is "How I do TYPE a superscript letter or number in Apple MAIL?"

You don’t. You do not and cannot get what you want here.

If you wish to alter the constraints, somebody can potentially provide alternatives or alternatives.

For instance, the following alternatives will violate your stated constraints. But they get you sub- and superscripts.

Entering HTML directly would allow access to <sup> and <sub>, and most tools thst can generate PDFs can do what you want in that format. Mail might indirectly accept HTML as message source, at least with some versions.

PDF attachments and Unicode input, as mentioned elsewhere.

The most direct: Thunderbird has subscript and superscript support.

Send your feedback to Apple, too: Product Feedback - Apple

I just opened Apple Mail on my computer. I entered m² and sent it to myself at a Gmail account. I received it with no problem. I made the ² using the Character Viewer in Mac OS which I then had copied and pasted to a Text Edit document where I store many characters I may use semi-frequently.

The ² isn't a superscript 2, it is a character in its own right just like an emoji.

½ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅙ ⅚ ⅐ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ ⅑ ⅒

μ ℃ ℉

For ° there is a keyboard 'shortcut'; option+shift+8.

I did all of those in TextEdit, but I see that Mail does indeed have in the Edit menu > Emoji&Symbols so if you didn't mind spending some time hunting you could get it from that menu too.

I didn't look for "rd" There's a couple of hundred characters in that menu item and I only look for the ones I needed and saved them.

As others have noted, Mail isn't a powerful word processor. If you need to do something like that then you are better off using software that does what you want and then saving it as a PDF or whatever.

If you want to type it in Mail then unless it is in something the keyboard can do with modifier Keys (look unders Keyboard Viewer) then your answer is "No, you can't do that in Mail."

People who need more complete formatting features for email often switch to Outlook. It can set default fonts for outgoings and has buttons for super and subscript in its mesage composing pane.

You probably have to go to the edit menu item and find one in Emoji & Symbols.

I keep a TextEdit file of my most frequently used ones and copy and paste from there unless you can find a keyboard combination for what you want.

How to use emoji, accents, and symbols on your Mac - "Press Control–Command–Space bar. The Character Viewer pop-up window appears"

Use emoji and symbols on Mac - Apple Support

Conditions are what we as responders to questions note when someone prequalifies with I don't want this or that in an answer.

Apple Mail does not natively support superscripts or subscripts without external help. That is the gist of what I said earlier.

Unicode characters --> ʳᵈ

Again, a copy and paste solution. I guess it depends upon how desperate you are. I don't know if you could set it up as a keyboard shortcut, of maybe find some third party utility that would let you do that. You don't provide any context in which you are trying to do this. There's times when I write a whole document that needs special characters. What I do is set up a unique string such as zzz for where I want the character, then later do a global search and replace with teh actual desired string.

Actually it looks like you can "type" in the characters, but it is not easy. I spent 15 minutes researching this and the solution appears to be very complicated, but would meet your strict criteria. It depends upon how much work you wish to do. You basically end up adding a unicode keyboard to your keyboard's mapping and then change mappings when you need to enter unicode. Yeah, cumbersome, but you insisted you only wanted to type. Some people remap some other key combination to do the keyboard layout swapping. Another person has the whole thing as an Automator workflow. The stumbling point is the hex code for the letters you want are 5 and 6 characters long, so the standard unicode apparently won't accept that (limit 4). I stopped researching at that point. You can probably find some way to do it. Me, I'd just do my global search and replace trick.

Limnos wrote:

The stumbling point is the hex code for the letters you want are 5 and 6 characters long, so the standard unicode apparently won't accept that (limit 4). .

Those characters with longer hex codes can be input by typing two 4 (utf 16) digit codes in a row. For example, U+1f600 is typed with the Unicode Hex layout by holding down Option and typing D83DDE00.

But unicode superscript letters are often unsuitable for use in text in any case because of poor font support.