I am paranoid that I missed this in my search of the topics, because it seems like such an obvious error, but I couldn’t find this topic and I’ve done a bit of testing on it so I feel I need to report it.
This is a template I tweaked from a copy of the default Non-fiction manuscript (TNR) a few months ago.
I originally had it set to Use Facing Pages. Neither <$title> nor <$parenttitle> nor <$projecttitle> worked on either Main Body or Facing Pages footers. So I tried turning off Use Facing Pages, and they still won’t work. Just the text of the tag shows up. This is all when compiling to PDF; I haven’t tried *.docx because that’s not what I need.
I don’t know if this has been fixed and for some reason this template is holding on to a bug and I need to recreate it, or what.