Align Environment – How to Resize Font in align* Environment

Question

A similar question has been posted here about the align environment. However, the solution does not seem to work for align*.

Preceding paragraph.
{\small
    \begin{align*}
        a &< b
    \end{align*}
}%
Following paragraph.

Answer 1

As we have no minimal example, an example when it works. (If you have some special combination of packages, please show the minimal example, when it doesn't work for you.)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{amsmath}


\begin{document}


Preceding paragraph.
{\small
    \begin{align}
        a &< b
    \end{align}
}
Following paragraph.


Preceding paragraph.
{\small
    \begin{align*}
        a &< b
    \end{align*}
}
Following paragraph.

\end{document}

(When we replace \small by, say, \tiny, the result is awful, but the same sizes are easy visible.)