LibreOffice 26.8 delivers professional typography,
broader language support, and no artificial intelligence
Berlin, 26 August 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced
LibreOffice 26.8, the new major release of the free and open source
office suite, available immediately for Windows, macOS and Linux in over
120 languages. The release is the work of 206 contributors, of whom 155
are volunteers.
The largest body of work in LibreOffice 26.8 addresses the world's
writing systems. Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically,
wraps bidirectional lines correctly, and handles object resizing in
right-to-left and vertical CJK documents. Calc sets cell direction
automatically when right-to-left text is entered. Math has gained
operators for the N'Ko and Adlam scripts, used for the Manding languages
of West Africa and for Fulani. None of this work has a commercial
market. It was done anyway, because a foundation does not have to ask
whether a language pays for itself before deciding to support it.
Writer introduces the Paragraph Composer, a layout algorithm that
balances word spacing across an entire paragraph instead of optimising
each line in isolation, eliminating the alternation between crowded and
sparse lines that has characterised justified text in word processors
since the technology existed. OpenType font variations are now supported
natively.
For document exchange, LibreOffice Chart preserves the newer chart types
that Microsoft Office writes into OOXML files – box-and-whisker, funnel,
Pareto, sunburst, treemap and waterfall – through a full round trip,
even though it cannot yet render or edit them. Calc adds Calculated
Fields to pivot tables and improves XLSX handling.
LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative AI features. Documents are never
transmitted to remote services, and no component requires network access
to function. The suite includes no advertising, no telemetry, no
subscription and no account requirement. It does, from this release,
display a donation banner in the Start Centre, linking to the donation
page and appearing nowhere else in the software: LibreOffice is free to
use, but not free to maintain.
Users in production environments may prefer LibreOffice 26.2.5;
LibreOffice 26.2.6 follows on 3 September 2026.
Organisations deploying LibreOffice at scale should consider the
enterprise versions offered by companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem.
These are optimised for managed environments and are backed by Service
Level Agreements, professional support and security updates maintained
for three to five years, a considerably longer horizon than the
community release cycle provides. Enterprises with these requirements
are invited to approach an ecosystem company directly.
LibreOffice 26.8 is available from www.libreoffice.org/download/.
Release notes: wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/26.8.
Donations: www.libreoffice.org/donate
Blog Post:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/08/26/libreoffice-26-8/
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Italo Vignoli - Marketing & PR
The Document Foundation & LibreOffice
email [email protected]
mobile/signal/telegram +39.348.5653829
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