Anyone who writes Arabic in a word processor knows the irritation: you paste an Arabic paragraph into an empty document and it lands on the left, the punctuation ends up in the wrong place, and you go hunting for the direction button. Version 26.8 of LibreOffice, released on 26 August, says it has solved this.
What changed for Arabic
Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when opening documents or pasting plain text. In Calc it sets cell direction automatically when the user types right-to-left content, with improved line wrapping in Arabic text.
And for text generally
Writer adds the paragraph formatter, a layout algorithm that balances word spacing across consecutive lines instead of calculating each line on its own. That is the cure for the ugly gaps in justified text.
With it comes native support for OpenType font variations, and alignment to a baseline grid inside text frames.
Microsoft files
The charting module now saves newer chart types that Office writes into OOXML files: box and whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap and waterfall. Saving works; editing does not.
The position on AI
The release announcement is unusually blunt: the version contains no generative AI feature, documents are not sent to remote services for processing, and no component of the suite needs a network connection to work. The foundation describes this as deliberate: anyone handling confidential or personal data needs to know where it goes, and the only guarantee that survives scrutiny is that it does not leave the machine.
Release figures
Available now, free, for Windows, Mac and Linux in a hundred and twenty languages. It gathers the work of two hundred and six contributors, a hundred and fifty-five of them volunteers.
A pleasing addition: the maths module gained named functions and operators for the N’Ko and Adlam scripts, used for the Manding languages and for Fula in West Africa.
Photo: a keyboard with Arabic letters. By qubodup, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
Source: The Document Foundation blog, LibreOffice 26.8 release announcement, 26 August 2026.
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