LibreOffice 26.8 boosts scripts & typography support

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 26.8, with changes to typography, writing system support and document exchange.

The free and open-source office suite is available for Windows, macOS and Linux in 120 languages. Development began in late 2025 and involved 206 contributors, including 155 volunteers.

Much of the work in LibreOffice 26.8 focuses on bidirectional and complex text, affecting users who work in right-to-left scripts and other writing systems that have often received limited support in mainstream office software.

In Writer, the software now detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. Line wrapping places end-of-line spaces according to paragraph direction rather than adjacent characters, and resize handles now behave correctly in right-to-left and vertical Chinese, Japanese and Korean documents.

Formatting marks have been extended to make bidirectional control characters visible. In Calc, entering right-to-left text into an empty cell now sets that cell's direction automatically, and new documents default to start alignment rather than left alignment.

Math gains named functions and operators for the N'Ko and Adlam scripts, used for Manding languages in West Africa and for Fulani. The release also adds left-pointing vectors and harpoons for right-to-left formulas.

A broader compatibility change addresses font names recorded in languages other than the interface language, allowing documents created in one environment to display the typefaces chosen by their authors in another.

Typography changes

Writer introduces what LibreOffice calls the Paragraph Composer, a text layout algorithm that balances word spacing across consecutive lines instead of handling each line separately. The aim is to improve justified text, where uneven spacing can make paragraphs look inconsistent.

The suite now supports OpenType font variations natively, meaning variable fonts can be used with their built-in controls for elements such as contrast and proportion. Baseline grid alignment has also been fixed for text inside frames, and the grid can now be displayed during editing with a configurable color.

Document exchange

Another area of work focuses on preserving documents when users exchange files with other office suites. LibreOffice Chart now offers basic round-trip support for newer chart types written into Office Open XML files by Microsoft Office, including box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap and waterfall charts.

LibreOffice still cannot render or edit those chart types. Instead, it identifies the unsupported type and preserves the underlying chart definition so that a file opened and saved in LibreOffice can return intact to the application that created it.

Region map charts remain a weaker point. According to The Document Foundation, the chart type survives the round trip, but much of the geographic content does not.

Calc also improves handling of line breaks in referenced cells in XLSX files, while form controls in XLSX documents now appear in the Navigator. The spreadsheet application adds calculated fields to pivot tables, restores silent rejection of invalid data entries and introduces a shuffle command to randomize the order of cells in a range.

Wider interface update

Elsewhere, Impress and Draw now support multiple page sizes within a single document. Impress also adds presentation sections for grouping slides, shows custom slide names beside slide numbers and can convert numbered lists to bulleted ones.

The Notebookbar user interface now uses a different background color for each application, making Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw easier to distinguish. Its tabs have category labels, support mouse-wheel or touchpad scrolling, and theme color changes no longer require a restart.

Accessibility changes include improved reporting of table row and column indexes in Writer for screen readers, in line with ARIA specifications. The special character selector is also fully navigable by keyboard.

Base now preserves SQL comments when queries are switched to Design View and supports filtering on date, time and timestamp columns with the embedded Firebird database. Python scripts can be created and edited directly from the Macro manager without installing an extension.

No AI features

LibreOffice 26.8 also takes an explicit position on artificial intelligence. The release contains no generative AI features, does not send documents to remote services for processing and does not require network access to function.

This is also the first LibreOffice release to show a donation banner in the Start Centre, which appears when the suite launches without opening a document. The banner appears periodically rather than at every launch and links to the project's donation page.

The organisation says LibreOffice does not include advertising, telemetry, subscriptions, account requirements or paid feature restrictions. Development is funded by donations to The Document Foundation and by companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem.

Users will also see some practical changes. The Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts are no longer bundled, Safe Mode has been renamed Troubleshoot Mode, and obsolete Java applet configuration has been removed, along with the OfficeBean example in the software development kit.

Outlining the approach behind language support work in the new version, the organisation said: "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."

On its stance against generative AI in the suite, it added: "Any organisation handling confidential, legally privileged or personal data needs to know where that data goes, and the only assurance that survives an audit is that it does not leave the machine."