I am using a String Manipulation node in KNIME to join some columns.
join($surname$, ", ", $given-names$, toEmpty($xref$))
Is it possible to have all values within the $xref$ column be superscripted?
I'm not sure if this is even possible. I have read about using "sup," but I don't think that works here, simply returns errors.
If you only need to superscript characters that have Unicode superscript versions - e.g. only digits - then use String Manipulation to make the substitutions.
Otherwise I don't think KNIME has any capabilities for handling formatting within text of a table cell, but I'm also not aware of any easy way of transferring formatted text into Excel (assuming you're using Excel).
The closest I could find is the Excel XML Spreadsheet 2003 (.xml) format, which appears to save text with superscripts into a relatively straightforward XML based format and load it back in with the same formatting. If you don't need much other formatting in your spreadsheet output perhaps you can use KNIME's XML capabilities (which aren't bad), and/or a Python script using something like the lxml.etree library, to create output in this format.
Alternatively, the best solution I can think of is to 'tag' the text that should be superscripted, using some character sequences that won't appear in the output otherwise - which might as well be <sup>text</sup> - then use Excel VBA to find these tags, format the text between them as superscript and delete the tags.
I would try asking this on the KNIME forum in case anyone there has a better suggestion.