LibreOffice 26.8 boasts professional typography, broader language support, and ‘no forced AI’

The Document Foundation is introducing LibreOffice 26.8, a new major release of the free and open source office suite, available immediately for Windows, macOS and Linux in over 120 languages. According to the vendor, this release is the work of 206 contributors, of whom 155 are volunteers.

The newest features in LibreOffice 26.8 address the world's writing systems, according to The Document Foundation. 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.

Writer introduces the Paragraph Composer, a layout algorithm that balances word spacing across an entire paragraph instead of optimizing each line in isolation, eliminating the alternation between crowded and sparse lines that has characterized 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.

Additionally, 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.

Organizations deploying LibreOffice at scale should consider the enterprise versions offered by companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem, the vendor said.

These are optimized 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 http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

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