Small caps unsupported(?) on the reMarkable tablet

[Shreevatsa R]

Hello,

I'm reading a "compatible epub" from Standard Ebooks on the reMarkable tablet, and unfortunately that device's epub support doesn't seem to include small caps: everything appears in lowercase, leading to a worse experience than if the epub had not tried to use small caps at all.

(For example I see: "Deck of eastward-bound steamer. major dumbarton seated on deck-chair, another chair by his side" — when "Major Dumbarton" or even "MAJOR DUMBARTON" would have been better.)

- Is this a known issue with the device, or specific to this work (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/saki/short-fiction)?

- Assuming it's a generic issue, would it be possible for the "compatible epub" format to account for this somehow (fall back to not using small caps)? Or a local change / script that I could run on the epub, to avoid using small caps?

Thank you,
Shreevatsa

[Alex Cabal]

This sounds like a rendering error with reMarkable and you should
contact them to fix it.

In the ebook source code, the phrase you're referring to is correctly
capitalized. You can confirm this by unzipping the ebook and inspecting
the file yourself. Therefore reMarkable is incorrectly rendering it as
all-lowercase.

(In this ebook, it should actually be rendered as all small caps, which
are capital letters but with the height of lowercase letters.)

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[Shreevatsa R]

On Friday, 23 January 2026 at 13:04:25 UTC-8 Alex Cabal wrote:

This sounds like a rendering error with reMarkable and you should
contact them to fix it.

In the ebook source code, the phrase you're referring to is correctly
capitalized. You can confirm this by unzipping the ebook and inspecting
the file yourself. Therefore reMarkable is incorrectly rendering it as
all-lowercase.

Yes I know, it''s an issue with reMarkable -- their rendering of epub is buggy. But from what I understand, the quality of epub readers is variable in general, not all of them support all features, and this one seems particularly bad. So given that I'm unlikely to get them to fix it any time soon, I'm wondering whether there's some workaround I can apply, to have the epub not use small caps, so that I can continue reading while I wait for them to fix it :) 

(I can look into trying to understand this; was just wondering whether this was a known/common issue with known solutions.)

Thank you,

[Alex Cabal]

I suggest contacting them anyway, presumably they would like their ebook
reader to render well.

In the meantime if you are able to edit the epub, remove any instances
of `font-variant: all-small-caps;` that are in the `./css/local.css`
file. That might fix it.

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[Shreevatsa R]

Thanks for the pointer; I removed the instances of "text-transform: lowercase" in local.css (in all three cases just following "font-variant: small-caps;") and that helped (the result is still not small-caps, but at least the uppercase letters show up as uppercase: like "Major Dumbarton").

Interestingly, I notice that in at least some cases (like story titles and subtitles, and the "Mrs." but not "Carewe" in "Enter R. Mrs. Carewe, seats...") the device does show small-caps (caps-and-small-caps, i.e. not all-small-caps), so the problem with the renderer is not as universal as "small caps never works"; it's something more subtle. Anyway I've reported it to them as well.

Regards,

[Alex Cabal]

Ah, I forgot that in the compatible build we replace all-small-caps with
small-caps and lowercase. I'm glad you got it fixed.

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