Hi Daniel, A Japanese user reported the following issue: the footnote layout changed between TeX Live 2016 and TeX Live 2018. MWE is shown at the end of this mail, and resulting PDFs attached. My friend and I looked into french.ldf, and found that the culprit is \begingroup ... \endgroup in the definition of \@makefntext. I guess the grouping is meant for localizing tokens in \localleftbox, which is a primitive specific to LuaTeX (and Omega/Aleph). Therefore, the grouping here is no more harm than good, at least for pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and Japanese pLaTeX/upLaTeX. I don't know what is a best practice for LuaLaTeX. % ========= %#!pdflatex \documentclass{article} %%% suppose that a document class redefines \@makefntext \makeatletter \def\@makefntext#1{% \advance\leftskip 15pt \parindent 3pt \noindent \llap{\@makefnmark\hskip1pt}#1} \makeatother %%% \usepackage[french,english]{babel} \usepackage{lipsum} \begin{document} \lipsum*[1]% \footnote{\lipsum*[2]}% \lipsum*[3] \end{document} % ========= p.s. Providing a fallback definition of \localleftbox (= silently gobbles the following argument) may be also problematic, but that's another issue... Best regards, Hironobu Yamashita GitHub: https://github.com/aminophen Japanese TeX Development Community (https://texjp.org)