How to Type Superscript & Subscript Text in Pages and TextEdit on Mac

Subscript and superscript text formatting is commonly used in the math and science world when writing out chemicals, formulas, and expressions. Subscript appears slightly lower and smaller than the primary text, while superscript appears slightly higher and smaller than the primary text (like an exponent, 8^3).

If you need to type subscript or superscript characters on a Mac, you’ll find it’s just a matter of enabling the desired baseline shift in either the Pages or TextEdit apps. You can also adjust the baseline-shifted text to be higher or lower to suit your needs.

Typing Subscript & Superscript Text on Mac

The exact steps differ slightly between Pages and TextEdit. Start typing as usual in either app, then when you reach the point where you want to insert superscript or subscript text, do the following.

In Pages:

Select the characters you want to raise or lower.
In the Format sidebar, click the Style button near the top. If the text is in a text box, table, or shape, first click the Text tab at the top of the sidebar, then click the Style button.
In the Font section, click the action pop-up menu (the button with three dots), click the Baseline pop-up menu, then choose Superscript or Subscript.
To continue typing regular text right after the superscript or subscript, click directly after the superscript or subscript character, click the action pop-up menu, click the Baseline pop-up menu, then choose Default.

If you’d rather move text higher or lower without changing its size, select the text, open the same Font section of the sidebar, and click the arrows next to the Baseline Shift value to raise or lower it.

In TextEdit:

Select the text.
Choose Format > Font > Baseline, then choose Superscript or Subscript. You can also choose Raise to move the text up a bit or Lower to move it down a bit, which can be helpful for fonts where the baseline change is less obvious.
To realign the text with the default baseline, choose Format > Font > Baseline > Use Default.

Subscript and superscript are also supported in the Microsoft Office suite for Mac. Speaking of Office, if you type baseline-shifted text in Pages and then save the file as a Word .doc, you may run into some formatting issues, depending on the version of Word and Office in use on the other end. For those situations, it may be best to save the file as a PDF and send that across platforms instead. Of course, printing out the superscripted fonts on physical paper shouldn’t be an issue at all.

Use Keyboard Shortcuts for Superscript & Subscript in Pages

A much quicker way to type subscript and superscript on the Mac is with two specific keyboard shortcuts in the Pages app.

Superscript text keystroke: Control + Shift + Command + Plus Sign (+)
Subscript text keystroke: Control + Command + Minus Sign (-)

After applying a shortcut, set the baseline back to Default in the sidebar when you want the next text you type to return to the regular baseline.

Note these keystrokes are built into Pages and aren’t immediately available in TextEdit. If you wanted to add similar keyboard shortcuts to TextEdit or another text-editing application of your choice, you could do that through System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, just be sure to pick a key combination that doesn’t conflict with any others.

A quick sidenote: using superscript is not necessary to type the temperature symbol on the Mac. You can use a specific keystroke to type the degree symbol instead.