in my mod, i enter a facility and look at a terminal, the terminal has a note about a problem and activates a quest.
the problem is the quest title doesnt show on screen but it just appears in the pipboy this is causing problems because people dont realise they have the quest.
so my question is, how do i make this quest title splash show on screen.

I have had this problem also for quests which are started *from a terminal*. I think the UI is not expecting to show a quest banner at the same time as the terminal screen. I see the quest objective appear, but not the quest name. Sometimes, the quest name shows up when I exit the terminal. I am not sure there is any solution. I have decided to just ignore the problem; it isn't that big a deal to me. Of course if anybody knows a solution, that would be great.

As david says the problem is likely that your in the terminal screen when you actually get the quest. One thing you could try is actually have the quest start after the player exits the terminal. So read the terminal, all that and have a result script that enables an activator or something on top of the terminal so when the player drops out of the terminal he triggers the activator which starts the quest.

Just a thought, no clue if that would work or not. But you get the general idea.