What does location sync do?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Faterson

The trouble is when that file is extremely long, like dozens of iPad screens long. Unfortunately, there are many mangled e-books like that out there.

Marvin currently uses filename+percentage inside the file, which should be pretty much the same as byte-count. For brief or moderately long chapters (sections = files), the sync results seem to be pretty precise. It's those extra-large sections=files that are troublesome; they may contain several chapters per section/file... It's a mistake on the part of the e-book publisher, but regular Marvin users will be unable to fix it manually.

Well, percentage is an approximate number based on a simple calculation based on the size of the file, not the contents. In ePub a file should not be greater than about 300K (actually a bit less) to work on some of the readers out there since the entire file must be loaded into ram. Using approximations is unlikely to yield good results as noted by some users, but as you say it is close most of the time. If there are a lot of images in the file then the references to these images can throw the percentage off. Of course, I am not talking about the display number, just the stored number used like a bookmark to find the location to resume reading.

Dale

[vikarti]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

In ePub a file should not be greater than about 300K (actually a bit less) to work on some of the readers out there since the entire file must be loaded into ram.

if 'regular user' have Calibre (and for somebody being present on MR I think we can assume that user at least knew about Calibre) - she can fix this. Just perform epub->epub conversion and Calbre will split into sections of about 260kb(configurable)
And, btw, speaking of 'should not be greater'...there is epub standard,yes.

But at least Apple Pages by default make epubs with exactly one section. no matter how long it will be.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by vikarti

Just perform epub->epub conversion and Calbre will split into sections of about 260kb(configurable)

That would be some huge "sections". I mean, an entire book can be below 260 KB. In my experience, most sections = chapters in moderately well executed EPUBs are a dozen of kilobytes, or so. For such standard-sized sections = chapters, Marvin's location sync works pretty fine as of now.