Q. How would you recommend citing a note which occurs in the front matter of a book on a page numbered with Roman numerals? Following the advice in CMOS, my troublesome page reference in the footnote would be xviiin1. Looks odd, no? And a bit hard to interpret for any but the editorial in-crowd?
A. It does look odd. You can prevent confusion by spelling out the abbreviation: xviii, note 1; at the very least, add a space before the n: xviii n1 (see CMOS 14.56). Regardless, be sure to let your copyeditor in on the strategy.