[tdf-announce] ANNOUNCEMENT LibreOffice 26.8

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 italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
mobile/signal/telegram +39.348.5653829


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