Okay, so how does this relate to generating small text? Well, as it turned out, there were a bunch of people that weren't too interested in Unicode.

Unicode sought to solve this by creating an international standard - meaning that everyone would be using the same number-to-letter 'rule book'.

So the problem in the 1980s was that there wasn't a universally agreed-upon set of 'rules' for which number refers to which character, and so every programmer was writing their own set of rules, and whenever their programs interacted with programs written by other programmers, they'd need to make specially designed 'translators' to allow the programs to communicate. so that you can visualise them on a computer screen (otherwise you'd be reading ones and zeros right now). Computers only understand numbers, and so you need to tell the computer which number refers to the letter 'a', which one refers to the letter 'b', etc. Unicode is an international not-for-profit organisation that started in the 1980s as an effort to 'unify' the 'codes' for textual characters used in the computing industry. So how is this copy and paste stuff possible? Well, to answer that question, we need to learn a little bit about Unicode. You wouldn't be able to do that if it was just a font. You can tell they're not fonts because it's possible to copy and paste the small text generated into other websites (like your Instagram bio, a Tumblr post, etc.). It's fairly self-explanatory - you put some text in the first box, and it'll convert it into three different small text 'fonts' for you. Welcome! This website is (quite obviously) a small text generator.

Type of wavy text lingo jam