this is a primitive, so it belongs in the pdfTeX manual and not in anything from LaTeX. We're still talking about \pdfstrcmp? Paul Isambert, Thanh, Hartmut, .., and I recently (Nov'10) released an update to the pdfTeX manual which includes that, among other "missing" primitives which had been implemented for years but never inserted into the doc. http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/pdftex/manual/ Best, Karl