I have figured out by trial and error that if Therion cannot determine a unique map output title, it assigns a value of 'sort of empty but not quite empty' to \cavename. What ever that value is, it looks like a space character, ie blank but with a height that equals a typical text line height. It's not one space, not two spaces, not an empty string, and I can see I could end up testing a lot of non printing characters before I find it. Maybe the programmer can remember what the magic value is, or someone with better tex skills (than my almost non-existent tex skills) can offer some code to identify the contents of a string variable, ie it's length or much better a list of ascii codes? code tex-map \edef\therioninferedmaptitle{\the\cavename} %save existing calculated cavename to variable %could put some code here to output the ascii codes contained in \cavename \edef\nostring{ } %save 'empty string' to variable \ifx\therioninferedmaptitle\nostring %test if therioninferedmaptitle matches empty string \cavename={Caves of the Flora Area} %if therioninferedmaptitle is empty do this \else %if it's not empty, do nothing, ie keep the value set by therion \fi endcode ;- ) Bruce