Steemit Markdown Howto: Superscript and Subscript support

While writing this article, Forever is a really, really long time, I had wanted to use exponents to enumerate very long periods of time. I just happened to type something like this while writing the article:

10¹³⁹ years

10^139^ years

See the code above? That is not how my StackEdit Markdown editor interprets superscript - the caret character opens and closes the tag for superscript in Markdown.

Here is a screenshot of what I saw on my editor with the code that I wrote:

But on Steemit, as you can see above, the Steemit Markdown parser doesn't interpret the caret in the same way that my Markdown text editor does. You may find that your Markdown editor interprets the caret tag as superscript, but that on Steemit, You get this:

10^139^

That's what I got, and I didn't figure that out until after I had published my article. So I did a few searches without much success.

About a day after I wrote that article, I learned that I was using the wrong search terms in my searches. I used exponents as my search term and came up with a lot of math results, even on Steemit. I can't remember where, or when, but in the last 24 hours or so, I saw the word "subscript". That was the word. Then I planted a note in my mind to search for that term come morning.

To ensure that I would find something that works on Steemit, I used the following search terms:

superscript and subscript on steemit

And I came upon this article at the top of the results page, Superscript and Subscript (Text Formatting), by Hive account@lovelyloon. Therein, I learned the following code for superscript and subscript tagging, in Markdown and verified to be supported on Steemit:

Superscript

10 to the power of 10: 10¹⁰

Ten to the power of 10: 10<sup>10</sup>

Subscript

The chemical formula for water is: H₂O.

The chemical formula for water is: H<sub>2</sub>O.

I actually found a few other articles that included instruction for how to use the correct tagging for Markdown on Steemit. The one I cite above was the first hit on Google. I like that article because it is brief and to the point, and stays on point about this topic.

I wrote and published this article because, I wanted something for my own reference, in case I needed it again later. I also wanted to demonstrate that some text editors support superscript using the caret key as opening and closing tags. I also wanted to see if the sup tags are supported by this Markdown editor (they are).

One more reason I wrote this article is that I wanted to help fellow Steemians steer clear of publishing an article with the wrong Markdown code, code that may work in their Markdown editor, but not on Steemit. That's what I did. So once I had found Hive account@lovelyloon's article, with the code that works, I went back and corrected my article since it was only two days old. I wanted to get that done before 7 days were up, before it becomes "cast in stone", so to speak.

I hope you find this article helpful. Your feedback is welcome. 😁
Serendipity Bonus: # Steemit Emojis Master List by Hive account@blueorgy.