Small text is a type of text formatting that makes your letters appear smaller than the standard text size. You might find this feature useful when you want certain segments of your text to be less prominent or just to play around with your text’s visual presentation. Typically, the HTML tag for small text is <small>, but how can we achieve this is Markdown?

The HTML Route

Unfortunately, standard Markdown does not directly support small text. Markdown’s syntax is much simpler than HTML’s, which makes it less flexible. However, one of Markdown’s advantages is that it can be mixed with raw HTML. So we can use the HTML <small> tag to render small text:

This is a sentence with <small>some small text</small>.

This would render as: This is a sentence with some small text.

Using Subscripts

Though not a direct replacement for small text, another tactic is to use subscript () tags in your Markdown:

This is a sentence with <sub>some small text</sub>.

This would render as: This is a sentence with some small text.

The disadvantage is that subscript text also gets slightly lowered.

As it stands, these are the primary ways to handle small text in Markdown until direct support might be added to the standard Markdown syntax. Understanding this workaround is useful for maintaining more stylish or complex Markdown documents.

For more on Markdown tricks and tips, refer to our previous tutorials. Markdown is a powerful tool with a diverse range of uses from coding to rendering markdown in React to formatting text in online forums.

Happy writing!