Moon+ Reader Pro sync across devices

[stumped]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

The page number is not what is stored because that would not work at all. It stores what percentage of the book you read so far.

yes, I'd forgotten that, but if you go to dropbox and open the sync file for that book in a text editor, you can see an nn.n number which will be the percentage. There are actually 2 files per book , the other one looks gibberish in notepad but I think it holds annotations and highlights

it does also use a chapter / file pointer, that is evident if you edit a book in a way that changes the underlying number of html files before sending it to the other device.
not sure exactly how it works, it may be a simple count that works with the TOC e.g. open with the file linked to the nth toc entry.

[MilesAhead]

Thanks for the info.

[SynrG]

Should be enough for some inspired soul to write a plugin. A tremendous Christmas gift to the community if anyone is interested. I imagine such a plugin would need to:

- Correlate filename in Dropbox & book within Calibre library
- Compare timestamps of book position updates from Calibre vs. Moon+ to decide which one is most recent
- Offer to update position based on "more recent" page# (assumes clocks are in sync)

To map x, y & z into something usable by the plugin requires an understanding of each of the supported formats. The following is just guesswork based on examination of several books in pdf and epub formats. I invite further comment.

- Moon+ .po format appears to be: uuuuuuuuuuuuu*x@y#zzzzz:pp.p%, where u is a 13-digit Unix epoch timestamp in milliseconds, p is the progress percentage, and x, y & z are indices into the structure of the document
- i think percentage is only for display purposes and is not useful for navigation to the position
- i think x in a pdf is logical page#
- i think x in an epub or mobi is a section index (could be from content.opf, Nth zero-based <itemref> which in turn can locate <item>, and from there, the link to the file)
- i think y in an epub or mobi is a secondary section index (in most books, is 0, but when non-zero, x seems to be the Nth zero-based <itemref> from which 0% is computed, whereas y identifies the <itemref> currently being read)
- i think z (absent in pdf) is a zero-based character# offset from the beginning of the file for the identified section, i.e. x, or if y is non-zero, then y instead

I looked at toc.ncx navMap as an alternate way of finding the section, but then "y" doesn't make sense, i.e. in books which don't have every file that is listed in the <manifest> also listed in toc.ncx, "y" doesn't seem to correspond to anything useful within toc.ncx.

[SynrG]

Originally Posted by stumped

There are actually 2 files per book , the other one looks gibberish in notepad but I think it holds annotations and highlights

The .an file does indeed contain annotations. To read it, you need to zlib-decompress it. It is raw zlib, so you need to add back the "magic number" as per https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/49066

e.g.

$ printf "\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00" |cat - ~/Dropbox/Apps/Books/.Moon+/Cache/Beyond\ Common\ Ground\ -\ Alden\ Thompson.epub.an |gzip -dc

Further reverse-engineering will be needed if we want to do something with this. But some of the numbers contained within it are bound to correspond to the position information I reverse-engineered from the .po files in my prior post.

[trocchietto]

I wrote an email to the dev
to update the FAQ

[trocchietto]

well i decided to use gdrive, and to move all the books in the cloud. I expect to sync not only the open page but also highlighted words and book's index
before I mess things up and since the official site is not so good, I would do a mini guide in this post, are these the steps?

I install moon+reader pro and GDrive

I move my books on GDrive

Do I need to move some folder generate by the system?(I mean where highlight, indexes etc are)

Do i need to sync manually everytime I want pressing a button, or there is a system that automatically detect wifi and update in the background all the data( kind of kindle for mobile)?

thanks

[Skydog]

I realize this is an old thread, however...

Has anyone had success syncing between two devices using Gdrive? It has not worked for me.

[stumped]

So use Dropbox. Works perfectly.
I would expect google drive to work exactly the same. There will be a folder in cloud apps/moon reader with the sync files inside. You do have to link moon to GD and authenticate each device, obviously. Then tick the relevent box.mit can't sync unless it has access permissions.

[barryem]

I tried using Google Drive at one point. I don't recall why. It sort of worked sometimes but it was so slow saving it's location at the end of a session and restoring it at the beginning that it took me a while to realize it worked at all. And sometimes it didn't. I tried it on the two phones I normally read on and the results were the same on both. I finally gave up and went back to Dropbox. It works perfectly and very quickly.

Dropbox changed their system to allow 3 connected devices but they don't count apps on other devices. They only count Dropbox apps themselves.

You can use Moon+ to access Dropbox from as many devices as you choose.

Barry

[Skydog]

@stumped- I intentionally did not reference Dropbox since they limited the number of devices to we freebie users.

@barryem- hmm, I hadn't considered devices vs. multiple MR installs. Thank you!

[lynnk03]

Hi, extremely new to Moonreader Pro app. Have just set up and linked my Moonreader to my Dropbox account, with the intention of syncing my entire library (not just highlights). However, when I go 'options' to attempt to export and sync my moonreader library, it only exports as a .mrpro file, which I understand only contains settings/highlights/bookmarks. May I enquire how do I go about exporting and syncing my entire moonreader library to Dropbox? Also, although I have linked to my Dropbox account, the backup .mrpro file invariably gets saved into my local storage. Is there any setting I have missed out?

[barryem]

I put my books in a folder called Ebooks on Dropbox and I use an app called Solid Explorer to keep my Ebooks folder on my phone synced with the one on Dropbox. That way the books I might want to read in the near future are always handy. Solid Explorer makes it very easy, more like trivial, to do this.

I also use Dropbox to sync my current location. I read on two phones, my regular phone when I'm not near home and another one with no service that I use just for reading when I am around home. That helps preserve the battery on my regular phone.

I can pick up either phone and it'll offer to sync with the other one within a second or two. I tap "Okay" and begin reading where I left off. It's far faster than Kindle's Whispersync and far more reliable.

I don't keep notes or bookmarks so I don't know much about that.

I'm not sure if this is any help to you but it works for me so I thought it was worth mentioning.

Barry

[stumped]

as i recall, when you set up sync you either sync last page & annotation... ( which I and previous poster do) or there is an option to sync the whole book. you may need to search within preferences more thoroughly to see if that option exists. [ there is no handbook ! ]

otherwise just keep your books in dropbox. Moon's file explorer will traverse all of dropbox, once authorised, so you can open any book directly from there

[lynnk03]

@stumped @barryem thanks!

[haertig]

Does anyone know, can Moon+ sync reading location/bookmarks to a different cloud service than DropBox or GoogleDrive? Specifically, I would want to sync to NextCloud - which is a cloud server that I host on one of my personal servers. Besides its native protocol, NextCloud also supports WebDAV, in case Moon+ is able to sync via that.