Small text generator

Neither of these is a size. They are separate letters that phoneticians needed and Unicode encoded, and everything odd about them follows from that. In the Uralic and International Phonetic alphabets a small capital marks a reduced or voiceless sound, and a raised letter marks aspiration or a secondary articulation — ʰ after a consonant is the aspiration in a transcribed English p. Decoration was never the purpose, so the alphabets stop where the phonetics stopped.

That is why they are incomplete, and why the gaps are where they are. There has never been a small-capital x in Unicode; a small-capital q was finally encoded in 2016 and is still missing from most fonts, so this substitutes a full-size Q, which is closer in shape than an ordinary q would be. On the superscript side only q is absent. Three letters across two alphabets, and any word containing one of them shows the break.

The small capitals are also not one block but three, which is the other reason this cannot be a simple offset the way the mathematical styles can. ᴀ ʙ ᴄ ᴅ ᴇ and most of the rest are in Phonetic Extensions; ɢ ʜ ɪ ʟ ɴ ʀ ʏ sit further back in IPA Extensions, having been encoded earlier for the IPA itself; and ꜰ and ꜱ are in Latin Extended-D, added later still. The superscript set is scattered the same way, and its digits are the oldest part of it: ¹ ² and ³ came in with Latin-1 in the 1980s because print needed cm² and ½, while ⁰ and ⁴ through ⁹ were added later, which is why a font can render 3² and fail on 3⁴.

One difference between the two is worth knowing before you pick. Superscript letters are modifier letters and carry a compatibility decomposition, so NFKC normalisation folds ʰ back to h — a search or a login field that normalises input will treat the superscript word as the ordinary word. Small capitals have no decomposition at all: ᴀ normalises to ᴀ and nothing will ever match it against an a. If you want the effect to survive a form, small caps; if you want the text to remain findable, superscript, and only where the system normalises.

None of this is what a word processor does. Real small caps are an OpenType feature that redraws the capitals of the font you are already using, at a weight matched to the lowercase; a document set that way stays plain text underneath and reads correctly aloud. These substitute characters instead, which is the only way to carry the effect into a field that has no formatting, and the price is that a screen reader announces them as phonetic symbols or skips them.