[Tony_A20]

Thanks for your prompt reply and support for an epub newbie. Having successfully completed the hand-built process for the Kindle format, I'm surprised at the problems I'm having with epub.
The Kindle generator, "Kindlegen" builds the document from the construction files (opf, ncx etc) and provides very good error messages for all problems, and builds a single o/p file.

The epub process doesn't allow any error checking of the construction files until everything is successfully packaged in a Zip container, making the process more difficult I think, especially with the restrictions on archive position of mimetype, and file attributes.

I'll give the zipunzip download a try and see if I can get another step along the process.

Thanks again,

Tony