LibreOffice 26.8 released [LWN.net]

Version 26.8 of the LibreOffice suite has been released.

LibreOffice 26.8 concentrates on three areas: the typographic quality of what the suite produces, the range of writing systems it handles correctly, and the fidelity with which documents survive exchange with other office suites.

The largest single body of work in this release addresses bidirectional and complex text. Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. Line wrapping places end-of-line spaces according to the direction of the paragraph rather than that of the adjacent characters. Object resize handles behave correctly in right-to-left and vertical CJK documents. Bidirectional control characters are now visible alongside other formatting marks. In Calc, typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets the direction of that cell automatically.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

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Nice features! Now lets hope in some more love for impress!

Posted Aug 26, 2026 13:54 UTC (Wed) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (2 responses)

Kudos to the LibreOffice developers for a great release and for the typography improvements! That said, there's still one bit of an ugly duckling in the suite: Impress, which has a few pain points:

In the Qt and KF5/6 VCLs, many slide transition effects have been broken, fixed, and re-broken again, making these VCLs substantially unusable for presentations. Unfortunately, they're the default on KDE. Maybe this has been fixed in 26.8 (I need to try it), but certainly things like "fade" haven't worked properly through the 26.2 series, at least on Arch.
The lack of "anchor as character" for graphics and equations makes it extremely difficult to build presentations that include math. Formulas that aren't part of the text almost invariably end up in the wrong place.
The lack of proper layout support makes compatibility with MS Office a nightmare. What's funny is that some internal support for layouts seems to exist, since files made with MS Office display almost correctly... but then it's impossible to keep editing them properly.

I believe points 1 and 2 are especially damaging to the application's perception. When someone gives a presentation in front of 200 people and effects break or formulas appear in the wrong place, it casts a bad light on the presenter's ability to pick the right tool for the job. Point 3 explains why tools that don't use ODF, such as OnlyOffice, get preference in many pragmatic environments notwithstanding reliance on a less open file format.

Nice features! Now lets hope in some more love for impress!

Posted Aug 27, 2026 12:04 UTC (Thu) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link] (1 responses)

Re you point 2, page 403 of the Writer Guide pdf has this sentence:
"In Anchor, select As character, To Paragraph or To Character as the anchor type for the image or graphic."

Is this not what you want?

Nice features! Now lets hope in some more love for impress!

Posted Sep 7, 2026 9:41 UTC (Mon) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

Re you point 2, page 403 of the Writer Guide pdf has this sentence: "In Anchor, select As character, To Paragraph or To Character as the anchor type for the image or graphic."

Is this not what you want?

It is exactly what I would like. It is available in writer, but not in draw/impress. That's why I am saying that impress needs some love.

Draft mode

Posted Aug 28, 2026 10:39 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

* A Draft view hides headers, footers and margins for distraction-free work.

That is a feature worth upgrading for! LibreOffice Writer forcing to see headers&footers while editing has always annoyed me.