Is there a way to insert superscript in a Mail message?

Mail does not have a direct way to select arbitrary text and make it into a superscript or subscript.

It is possible to do some of this with Unicode.

 > System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > ✔︎ Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar

Go up to the menu bar and click on the flag that's now up there, and select Show Character Viewer

Select whatever characters you want. There are superscript and subscript digits.

If the receiver of your mail message doesn't have RTF and Unicode support, then they might not get the message as expected. In general, using PDF or other similar document format gives you better control over displayed text. Without a PDF or such attached, the display of your message is much more dependent on the display capabilities of the remote mail client.

Related: mail and text edit, or the various entries underneath the More Like This section on this web page.

If this not needed frequently, you can open TextEdit in Rich Text, use Format->Font->Baseline->Superscript, then copy and paste into Mail.

(There may be a way to add this to styles if used frequently)

Tony T1 wrote:

If this not needed frequently, you can open TextEdit in Rich Text, use Format->Font->Baseline->Superscript, then copy and paste into Mail.

Do you actually test this? When I do it, the received email does NOT have any superscript in it, even though the email you are sending looks like it does.

MrHoffman wrote:

If the receiver of your mail message doesn't have RTF and Unicode support

Only Unicode support is necessary. RTF does not matter for Unicode super/subscripts.

Tony T1 wrote:

you can open TextEdit in Rich Text, use Format->Font->Baseline->Superscript, then copy and paste into Mail.

In further experiments I was able to get this to work if I changed the font in the outgoing message to something other than the Mail default.

Tom Gewecke wrote:

Do you actually test this? When I do it, the received email does NOT have any superscript in it, even though the email you are sending looks like it does.

I tested with an email to myself, on receipt I see:

Tom Gewecke wrote:

MrHoffman wrote:

If the receiver of your mail message doesn't have RTF and Unicode support

Only Unicode support is necessary. RTF does not matter for Unicode super/subscripts.

Correct, but if the message is encoded in RTF, the client needs that. RTF gets involved here (or PDF) when more than just the simple sub- or superscript digits are needed.

The usual reason that folks ask these sorts of questions is to establish specific documentation and formatting in their outgoing mail messages, which generally fails utterly because the receiving client mail application renders the message contents differently, whether it's a lack of MIME, RTF, HTML or Unicode support. Or differences in the support. Or settings that the local user has enabled to control the rendering, as can be the case with HTML-based MIME-encoded mail. Which leads to the usual recommendation to attach a PDF. Or test the outgoing messages with the different mail clients that will be used to receive the mail messages — which can obviously be quite impractical.