Footnote language always reverts to English (Word 2007)

[Ergophobe]

I'm trying to get my footnotes to be the same language as my document.

My document template sets the default language to French. I have tried this
with Detect Language set to both on and off.

When I create a new document based on my template, it does indeed default to
French, but only for the main text.

When I add a footnote, it briefly shows as French, but before I type a
single word, it reverts to English.

I've tried every setting I can think of, but to no avail. The damn thing
will simply not let me create a footnote in the same language as the running
text.

I can, of course, select all text in the footnote and make it French, but I
have to do this every time I create a footnote (and I create a lot of
footnotes).

Blows me away that after twenty years of this product, Microsoft has *never*
in a single version of Word gotten footnotes "correct" (that is, working as
an academic scholar would expect).

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/LangFmt.htm. You may also
want to make sure that the language of the Footnote Text style is not
explicitly defined as English.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Ergophobe]

Suzanne,

Thanks for the response. I got confused, thought I had posted it somewhere
else, reported it here and then only saw that you had already responded.
Apologies to all for any confusion.

I've tried pretty much everything that you suggest and what is suggested in
the word tip you link to. That is

- I set the document language as French.

- turned off automatic language detection.

- explicitly declared the Footnote Text style language as French.

- I decided to go nuclear: I went into the Word Options -->> General
-->>Language and changed the Primary Editing Language to French.

- and I tried all these steps on both existing and new templates.

The only thing I have done is set Windows region/language setting to France,
which of course I don't want.


BTW, this is the trial version of Word 2007 Home and Student on Vista. All
updated with most recent updates. If I can't fix this, I might have to just
keep sticking to Word 2000, which works as expected in this respect.

Anyway, thanks again for the response and sorry I got confused.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

What you've done *should* work, but the conventional wisdom is that Word
often "forgets" what language is set as the default unless you also set it
as the default language in the Regional and Language Settings in Windows, so
I don't know what else to suggest.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Ergophobe]

Well, thanks for the reply. I was afraid of that.

Normally I might put this down to Vista permissions weirdness, but I'm
having this issue on both XP and Vista.

Very strange.