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Originally Posted by JasonB
I finished reading that a little while ago. I didn't notice a small caps problem (I may have just missed it) but I did notice that there were a few places where it looked like there were supposed to be footnotes. (I.e. a superscripted asterisk after a sentence.) I know that Stephenson has used footnotes in some of his other books, particularly the Baroque Cycle, so I was suspicious that he actually had used footnotes in Anathem also - but that the electronic version was simply missing them altogether. (I don't know how footnotes - as opposed to endnotes - could be applied to an electronic book, but surely they should go somewhere rather than simply being absent altogether.)
On a related note, I've read several electronic books now that:
1. Have mis-spelled words. These don't even exist in the English language. And they are repeated. So, it's obvious that a physical book was scanned in and mistakes were generated via OCR software. But, after this was done, the result wasn't even run through a spell check!
2. French words with accents that use uppercase letters rather than lowercase. So, for instance, instead of é you get É.
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Anathem didn't have any footnotes (I seem to remember seeing an interview with Stephenson where he comments on how he chose not to use footnotes for this book). But there were three "Calca" appendixes at the back of the book that were referenced. Unfortunately, I don't remember if they were linked or not.
Generally, footnotes (actually, more precisely endnotes) are linked from the text by pressing the enter/select/whatever button on the 505 (the one in the middle of the arrow disc), and then the footnote/endnote is usually linked back to the note-point (though not always). If it's not, you can just press left on the arrow disc to step back through your page-view history.
The book I'm reading right now (ePUB of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) has plenty of footnotes that are properly linked, and also uses a lot of accented characters that display correctly on the 505 (both with the default and a substituted font). If you're running into issues of the accented characters being capped, that's an authoring issue. They specified the wrong character in the text.