Standards are technical documents drafted by engineers and discussed in committees before being implemented in code. However, to discuss them only in technical terms would be to overlook an essential aspect of their nature and function.

In fact, standards are also – and above all – political tools because they define market players, determine the direction of development, and establish the interests served by the ecosystem. In other words, they underpin the market’s power relations.

What a standard does

A standard is a coordination mechanism that allows multiple independent parties, such as software developers, hardware manufacturers, content creators, governments and businesses, to collaborate without having to negotiate the terms of their interaction every time.

Like a language, a standard enables communication with everyone who speaks it. It is an immensely valuable promise of universal communication, which is why standards are so important in computing, where the network effects of compatibility multiply rapidly.

However, a standard also defines the conditions for participation.

A simple, transparent standard based on widely available knowledge can be implemented by multiple parties without creating inequality.

In contrast, a complex, deliberately obscure standard that requires specific expertise can only be implemented correctly by those who defined it, creating inequality.

Therefore, the complexity of a standard acts as a barrier, determining who can access the market and the balance of power within it.

Open ecosystems

An open ecosystem does not depend on a document containing the specifications of the standard, but rather on any stakeholder’s ability to implement the standard fully and correctly in accordance with the specifications, without resorting to undocumented behaviour or reverse engineering.

This requires the specifications to be written clearly, to allow for only one interpretation, and for the standard not to depend on behaviours defined by the reference implementation, which would make the latter a mandatory dependency. It also requires the standard to be stable enough to prevent compliant implementations from becoming obsolete due to silent revisions.

When all these conditions are met, the standard can be implemented by anyone, even those who played no part in its creation. Universities, small businesses, open-source communities, government agencies, and individual developers can all produce compliant software.

Competition is possible based on the quality of the implementation rather than proximity to the standard’s authors or reverse engineering. The standard provides a foundation upon which anyone can build.

Closed ecosystems

While the closure of an ecosystem through a standard may be accidental, it is usually intentional and based on a series of fairly easy-to-list mechanisms.

The first mechanism is unnecessary complexity. When a standard defines its own solutions to problems that already have valid, widely implemented solutions, it forces other players to reinvent the wheel. Every proprietary subsystem is a new element that increases costs and often artificially limits compatibility.

The second mechanism is underdetermination. When specifications are ambiguous or limited, different implementations produce different results. When a document is displayed slightly differently, users always blame the second application rather than the format. This is an extremely insidious form of lock-in.

The third mechanism is extensibility. If the specifications permit the addition of proprietary extensions, the document is technically compliant with the standard, but only one programme can display it correctly. In this case, the standard merely covers a proprietary system.

In addition to these three mechanisms, there is direct or indirect influence over standardisation bodies. Direct influence occurs when the vendor can influence the standardisation process itself, shaping the compliance requirements to match the behaviour of their own application. Indirect influence occurs when the vendor can influence other members through factors external to the standardisation process.

The stakes beyond software

The consequences of open and closed standards affect more than just software developers.

For example, a government that archives its documents in a format that can only be handled correctly by a specific piece of software is, in effect, dependent on the vendor that developed it. This means that the long-term preservation of public documents is subject to the commercial decisions of a private company.

Cultural institutions, such as libraries, archives and museums, face the same problem over longer timescales. An open, standardised format is more likely to remain readable over time than a proprietary format whose continued support depends on the strategic priorities of a single supplier.

For developing economies and public-interest organisations with limited resources, open standards provide a vital infrastructure that ensures equal access.

Reading the technical as political

When evaluating a standard, technical details become political.

Using #RRGGBB for colours rather than a proprietary system is not an aesthetic choice; it affects who can implement the format and who benefits from the ecosystem it creates.

Adopting the ISO 8601 standard for dates rather than a serial system inherited from a single piece of proprietary software based on a fifty-year-old bug is choosing interoperability over continuity with a proprietary past.

These choices add up.

A standard that consistently aligns with open and established practices rather than proprietary reinvention on the basis of multiple decisions of this kind is fundamentally different from a proprietary format that constantly does the opposite, even though both produce documents that appear identical on screen and both bear the label ‘open standard’. This label means very little.

What matters is whether independent implementers can develop fully compliant software and whether the ecosystem is genuinely accessible to all who wish to participate. Ultimately, the standard must serve the interests of users rather than the company that defined it.

These are political issues which deserve to be discussed as such.

Yesterday, MS Publisher users joined the millions of users who have been abandoned – or forced into a completely unjustified update – by Microsoft over the years, alongside those using Office LTSC 2021 and Office 2021. Consequently, anyone who has purchased a Microsoft 365 subscription will no longer be able to open their PUB files.

For millions of schools, parishes, associations, small businesses and local authorities, this is a major problem. For over thirty years, they have been producing newsletters, leaflets, programmes, posters and calendars using Publisher. From today, these documents are in a proprietary format, the only fully compatible application for which has been abandoned by the very company that created it.

What Microsoft suggests

Microsoft suggests converting PUB files to PDF format for viewing and printing, and to DOCX format for editing. In reality, neither of these represents a solution to the problem.

PDF preserves the layout but is not designed to be edited. DOCX can be edited, but Word is not a page-layout tool, so complex files lose their formatting during conversion.

In both cases, users are asked to transfer content from one vendor-controlled proprietary format to another vendor-controlled proprietary format – which is, in fact, the same vendor. This is because documents are regarded as a by-product of the application, rather than as information belonging to those who created them.

For Microsoft, therefore, it is perfectly normal for access to content to disappear along with the application. This is a fact that should raise more than a few questions, but it seems to go unnoticed, to the extent that many Microsoft users claim this problem does not affect them.

The free software community has solved the problem

Publisher’s PUB format is not an open standard, so the developers working on the Document Liberation Project have reverse-engineered it and created the libmspub library, which is used by LibreOffice and Scribus to import Publisher files. This is to enable MS Publisher users to continue reading their own documents regardless of Microsoft’s decisions.

This means it is possible to open PUB files using free software and save them in the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the only standard, open format for office documents, which is not dependent on any single application or company. Alternatively, they can be opened with Scribus, which is open-source desktop publishing software, but does not use a standard document format.

LibreOffice Draw is the quickest way to open, view, edit and manage Publisher documents, and although it is not a desktop publishing application, it can be used for small multi-page documents, such as newsletters, or for single-page documents of any format.

A lesson to bear in mind

MS Publisher is not the first Microsoft application to disappear from the market, and it certainly won’t be the last. Each time, users are faced with the same question: who controls access to my documents? If the format is proprietary, the answer is: the vendor. If the format is standard and open, such as ODF, the answer is: the user.

If you are responsible for documents in a public sector organisation, a school or an association, now is the time to check whether your file format is proprietary and dependent on a single vendor’s application, so that you can plan the transition to an open standard format whilst it is still possible to open them.

The LibreOffice community is here to help you.

Many thanks to all of you for your donations and your amazing support.

Please note that the features presented in this blog post are a preview. They’re still being worked on and are planned for the next version of Linux Mint.

Release Strategy and Development Cycle

This is the first time we’ve taken a full year to develop Linux Mint. Going from a 6-month release schedule to a yearly one was a tough decision to make, but we’re really starting to see it pay off. We’re taking on projects and implementing changes which would previously have been considered too large or ambitious. We’ve got time. We don’t feel rushed. Development feels solid and the OS keeps getting better.

I’ve been working on Linux Mint for more than 20 years now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many changes and new features implemented for a single release. It’s really exciting and it scares me a little bit because that also means we’re going to be very busy during the beta phase

Aside from new features, we’ve been fixing a huge number of bugs. We’ve also been working on Wayland compatibility, improving our processes and internal tools, and prototyping new editions.

Linux Mint 27 “Adrien”

Our next release is scheduled for Christmas, and it will be called Linux Mint 27 “Adrien”. 

I’ve really enjoyed using girls’ names since 2006. They gave each release an identity and made it feel much warmer than just a number. From “Ada” at the very start to “Zena” last year, we’ve now reached the end of the alphabet. It’s funny how this happened just as we’re moving to a new release schedule. I want to continue this tradition with the new series. This time we’re using boys’ names

As you can see, the release number represents the upcoming year. We’ll no longer use point releases, so the release after that will be 28. You’ll upgrade from 27 to 28 to 29, and so on.

Linux Mint 27 “Adrien” will be based on Ubuntu 26.04. It will be available in at least three editions: Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE.

Alarms

Alongside the new calendar, we’ve developed an application to manage alarms.

The application takes inspiration from Android, both in its interface and how it works.

It’s intuitive and really easy to use.

You can set recurring alarms, choose custom sounds, and receive notifications even when the application isn’t running.

This application is called “Clocks”. It is part of the Clockenstein project.

Alarm notifications are handled by the Clockenstein daemon and notification agent.

Other News

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

We’ve been working hard on three other projects, and we’re putting the finishing touches on them.

Next month we’ll talk about Superlight, Unfold, and Velocitty.

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When governments, organisations and companies move to LibreOffice – as we’re seeing in Austria, Germany and other countries – they usually enlist the help of Certified Migration Professionals.

Recently in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, we held a LibreOffice Migration Workshop. 40 attendees registered, from the public and private sectors, and the session was conducted pro bono by Lothar Becker, co-chair of LibreOffice’s Certification Committee. The goal of the workshop was to grow and foster the LibreOffice Technology ecosystem by supporting partners and government organisations in facilitating migrations to the suite.

It took place in the conference rooms of a hotel in central Nairobi, with a great view:

The event was hosted and funded by the Kenya branch of GIZ Germany, along with The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. The first two days focused on LibreOffice, covering best practices for migrations to LibreOffice Technology, with the first day being more user-centric and looking at the user interface and features of the software. There was also a general introduction to TDF and open source.

Then, the second day focused more on the migration process, providing deeper insights into migration and training protocols. Other topics included digital sovereignty with the Open Document Format (ODF) and other certification processes with TDF.

On the third day Lothar gave a talk called “Open source Community of Practice” in his capacity as OSBA board member. The talk focused on “Open Source as an Enabler of Digital Sovereignty & Innovation” with respect to DPI, Free and Open Source Software, open standards, and AI.

Special thanks to Carsten Glöckner, Amrit Labhuram, their team from GIZ Kenya for all their help and support in organising these events. Lastly, during the workshop Lothar had the opportunity to learn about the valuable work of the Telesky Foundation for digital participation of all children in Kenya from John Mbugua. Lothar handed over a book about “Ada & Zangemann” from Matthias Kirschner (Free Software Foundation Europe).

Last month we had the LibreOffice Conference 2026 in Pordenone, northern Italy. Huge thanks to the organisers for such a great event! At lunchtime on the final day we took a group photo, which you can see above – but of course, some people had left by then, so thanks to those people as well for attending

We’ve also finalised the YouTube playlist with 32 talks from the event. For a few talks which had recording issues, we don’t have videos of them, but the volunteer organisers did a great job recording the vast majority of talks.

The videos are also available on the Pordenone LUG’s PeerTube channel.

Now we’re looking ahead to the VII Latin American Congress of LibreOffice, and FOSDEM. We hope to see you there!

🚀 Features

• Added per-feed article filtering rules (#1217) by @antoncarrot in #1217

🐛 Bug Fixes & Minor Changes

• Format text in monospace inside pre-blocks, not just code-blocks (#1226) by @spacecowboy in #1226
• Do not update feed url if selfLink would change between http and https (#1228) by @spacecowboy in #1228
• Stopped changing feed urls to match selfLinks (#1257) by @spacecowboy in #1257

🌐 Translations

• Updated French translation using Weblate by @Matth7878 in commit
• Updated Hungarian translation using Weblate by @summoner001 in commit
• Updated German translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Polish translation using Weblate by @Aga-C in commit
• Updated Estonian translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Chinese (Simplified Han script) translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Serbian translation using Weblate by @eevan78 in commit
• Updated Ukrainian translation using Weblate by @G-H-User in commit
• Updated Czech translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Italian translation using Weblate by @Wiccio in commit
• Updated Japanese translation using Weblate by @YujiSoftware in commit
• Updated Turkish translation using Weblate by @oersen in commit
• Updated Chinese (Traditional Han script) translation using Weblate by @crlambda in #1227

❤️ New Contributors

• @crlambda made their first contribution in #1227
• @antoncarrot made their first contribution in #1217

Since its founding in 2010, The Document Foundation has used the LibreOffice logo to represent itself. This was a deliberate choice: a young project needed to concentrate recognition on a single name and a single mark, and LibreOffice was the name people needed to know.

Sixteen years later, the foundation’s work extends well beyond the product. TDF takes part in the development of the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, contributes to policy discussions on interoperability and digital sovereignty, and works with public administrations, standards bodies and other open source organisations. In these contexts, the foundation speaks as an institution, not as a software project, and it needs a signature of its own.

For this reason, we have worked with Ura Design to create a visual identity for The Document Foundation, consisting of a logo, a colour palette and a typeface. The logomark is a stylised page, a reference to the documents and the document standard at the centre of the foundation’s mission. It is shown here in its primary version.

The colour palette is built around the green of the logo, with a neutral scale for text and backgrounds. All the text and background combinations recommended in the guide meet the WCAG 2.1 contrast requirements, so that materials produced with the new identity remain accessible.

The typeface is Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson and released under the SIL Open Font License. It is used for the wordmark of the logo as well as for all texts, from reports and presentations to the website. A typeface released under a free licence is consistent with the foundation’s mission: anyone can use it, in LibreOffice or in any other application, without restrictions.

Nothing changes for LibreOffice. Its name, logo and visual identity remain exactly as they are. The two identities have different roles: LibreOffice identifies the software, while The Document Foundation identifies the organisation that hosts LibreOffice and its community, and represents them in the wider world.

The logo package is available for download at https://tdf.io/tdflogo. It includes vector (SVG) and raster (PNG) versions of the logo, a favicon, and avatars for social media. The Visual Identity Style Guide explains which version of the logo to use in each context, and sets out the colour palette, the typography and the rules for applying them consistently. Use of the logo is governed by TDF’s trademark policy.

Over the coming months, the new identity will replace the LibreOffice logo on the foundation’s website, social media accounts and institutional documents. Templates for LibreOffice Writer and Impress will also follow. If you maintain pages or materials that refer to The Document Foundation as an organisation, please update them with the new files. Pages that refer to LibreOffice should continue to use the LibreOffice logo.

Questions about the visual identity and its use can be sent to italo@documentfoundation.org

Unfortunately, the release of LibreOffice 26.8.1 has been a bit of a struggle, firstly due to a series of minor issues with the packaging of the Windows version, and then because of a serious malfunction in the server managing the downloads, which forced us to revert to the previous version for a few days.

Today, at last, LibreOffice 26.8.1 is available for download. All links have been checked at least three times to prevent the same problems from recurring. We would like to thank all our most loyal users – those who update LibreOffice immediately after every announcement – for their patience.

And we hope that this completely unexpected malfunction has not put any users off LibreOffice. The download link remains the same: https://www.libreoffice.org/download

We are releasing the State of the Project Slide Deck, which is updated quarterly and based on data extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

Over the course of 12 months, 297 developers worked on the source code, making a total of 11,676 new commits (Git). Of these, 2,596 (22%) were provided by 228 volunteer developers (77%), 4,818 (41%) by 11 developers from The Document Foundation (4%), and 4,636 (37%) by 58 developers from seven ecosystem companies (19%).

The slide deck is also a tribute to the top 20 Git and Gerrit committers, the top 20 Bugzilla issue submitters, the top 20 Discourse contributors, and the top 20 Weblate translators. Thank you to all of them and to all the other contributors.

Examining donations and downloads, the trend during the first nine months of 2026 confirms the positive trend that began in early 2025. The number of donations and downloads increased significantly in August and September 2026 thanks to a number of small but important changes to the marketing strategy and donation mechanism. It is important to note that the figures refer to the number of transactions, rather than their value, which is available via the ledgers published on The Document Foundation website.

You are invited to view the slides and download the file to compare it with the previous slide decks published in January, April and July. The next slide deck will be available in January and will cover the 12 months between 1 January 2026 and 31 December 2026.

In January 2026, we started publishing these slide decks to provide a transparent overview of the project’s progress through some of the most significant development, download and donation data collected by the TDF marketing team.

Why did LibreOffice 26.8 get over 4 million downloads in September? We answered this question, and more, in our talk at the recent LinuxDays event in Prague:

• Milestone

This is a security-oriented release with several security patches and bug fixes in the continuation of 1.30.0.

Note that our rolling-release channel (edge) is recommended for faster security patches.

Bug fixes highlights 🐛:

• Some security attack scenarios patched
• Fix domain-wide Retry-After
• Fix muting of feeds gone with HTTP 410

Feature highlights✨:

• CLI: Add optional feed argument to actualize-user.php

This release has been made by @Alkarex, @andris155, @fzlzjerry, @Inverle, @jamalkamaladdin, @jtracey, @Otolock and newcomers @akine, @colons, @ethanstoner, @gigioneggiando, @Juice-de-Orange, @pavel-miniutka, @qwist1233-cpu, @Sharawey74, @shcheglovnd, @TapuGithub, @yuchenshi, @ZainnQureshii

Full changelog:

• Deployment
  • Reword recommendations and explanations for edge (rolling release) vs. latest (versioned release) channels #9270
• Security
  • Config + increase default values for search max length and depth #9280
  • Accept a trusted proxy address given without a subnet #9301
  • Warn during session regenerate fail #9311, #9376
  • CI/CD add zizmor workflow for action security checks #9228, #9331
  • Use PHP #[\SensitiveParameter] #9322
  • Reject token access (RSS/OPML export, feed refresh) for disabled accounts #9336
  • Require POST+CSRF for self-update mutations #9335
  • Make the login challenge nonce one-time #9334
  • Bound ZIP import against decompression bombs #9332
  • Rotate session ID on all authenticated transitions #9333
  • Minz: Remove vulnerable and unused code path for displaying errors #9395
  • Fix NAT64 feed fetching on IPv6-only hosts #9372
• Bug fixes
  • Fix domain-wide Retry-After #9390
  • Fix muting of feeds gone with HTTP 410 #9391
  • Fix infinite redirect loop due to SCRIPT_NAME in PATH_INFO #9282, #9287
  • Restore the automatic reading view after marking articles as read, while preserving explicit filters #9288
  • Fix adaptive reading state after marking articles read #9290
  • Fix regression sharing links #9303
  • Don’t disable anonymous refresh when anonymous feed access is disabled #9354
  • Fix regression with HTTPS proxies due to wrong TLS SNI resolution #9341
  • Better enforce limits for feeds and categories #9357
  • Fix JavaScript error when opening a label menu in sidebar #9377
  • Fix custom favicon with GReader API #9409
• CLI
  • Add optional feed argument to actualize-user.php #9319
• UI
  • Various UI and style improvements #9298, #9369,
    #9388
• Extensions
  • Call check_url_before_add hook when previewing a feed #9343
• I18n
  • Add Belarusian #9351
  • Improve German #9370, #9385
  • Improve Italian #9370
  • Improve Japanese #9398
  • Improve Turkish #9349
• Misc.
  • Check SVG optimization in the tests CI workflow with SVGO #9361
  • Move PHPUnit flags to a config file and use strictest failure mode #9374
  • Avoid writing to log files during unit tests #9373
  • Bump Ruby gems automatically with Dependabot for docs #9401
  • Update dev dependencies #9323, #9324,
    #9325, #9326, #9327,
    #9328, #9368, #9378,
    #9379, #9380, #9381,
    #9402, #9403, #9404,
    #9405, #9406, #9407

( Note: this is a translation of an article on the Spanish-language blog)

For Adlair Cerecedo-Méndez, his work with LibreOffice began as a response to a specific need: helping the Mexican government obtain an office suite tailored to public institutions. Over time, that technical work also became an experience in collaborating with the international LibreOffice community and an opportunity to promote free software in the public sector.

Although Adlair had already been using LibreOffice since the OpenOffice days, his professional involvement with the project took shape around 2020, when he was invited to collaborate on the development of a government office suite. The initiative was part of a broader vision: reducing dependence on proprietary solutions, making use of free software, and strengthening the state’s own technological capabilities.

Building on an existing platform

Office GOBMX did not necessarily start out based on LibreOffice. At first, the possibility of creating a suite from scratch was considered, but the technical analysis revealed the scale of the challenge: developing, maintaining, and evolving an application of that kind would require considerable time and resources.

LibreOffice offered a mature, cross-platform, open-source foundation backed by an international community. Adapting it to government needs made more sense than reinventing an entire office suite. That was how the Office GOBMX approach was born: starting with existing technology and adapting it to the needs of public institutions.

The goal included reducing licensing costs, but it also involved moving toward greater technological autonomy. For Adlair, sovereignty does not mean switching tools overnight. It is a gradual process that allows the state to decide which technologies it uses, understand them, modify them, and maintain them with its own expertise.

Migration is also a human process

Implementation brought challenges involving compatibility with documents, macros, formats, and processes that had been built over many years around other tools. It was also necessary to determine what could work as-is and what required adaptation or reimplementation.

But the greatest challenge, Adlair recalls, was resistance to change. Office tools are part of many people’s daily routines, and a migration can disrupt familiar habits and procedures. That is why simply installing software is not enough: it is necessary to analyze processes, test compatibility, migrate documents, train users, and provide guidance and support.

Coexistence with Microsoft Office was also part of the transition. In public administration, documents circulate among government institutions, citizens, businesses, and vendors. Although LibreOffice provides interoperability with widely used formats, some complex documents, templates, and macros require special attention. The strategy, Adlair explains, must be gradual: promote open formats such as ODF without disrupting work or losing the ability to exchange files with the existing ecosystem.

Adapt, Audit, and Learn

Open-source software made it possible to develop components for specific institutional needs. One example is a document validator created to analyze internal elements in files generated with Microsoft tools and obtain technical evidence about the information they contained. In a government context, Adlair points out, it is important to understand those elements before assuming they are irrelevant or have no implications.

The ability to work with the code was also valuable when dealing with legacy processes, such as old macros and workflows associated with Microsoft Access. Rather than accepting the limitations of a closed tool as unavoidable, the team was able to address those cases from an adaptation and migration perspective.

At the same time, the Office GOBMX experience offers lessons that may be useful to other public administrations. Although each government has different needs, many of the challenges are recurring: technological dependence, legacy documents, interoperability, training, and resistance to change. The methodology—from planning and compatibility analysis to implementation and ongoing support—can provide a useful reference.

From Technical Experience to Community

Adlair’s relationship with the international LibreOffice community grew stronger in 2023, when he attended the Latin American LibreOffice Conference in Mexico City. There, he met members of the community and gained a closer understanding not only of the software, but also of the collaboration that sustains it.

From his perspective as a member of The Document Foundation, that connection is especially valuable: people who implement LibreOffice in government environments can share real-world cases, interoperability needs, and lessons learned from large-scale deployments. In turn, the community provides expertise and a shared space for contributing to the project’s development.

For Adlair, continued compatibility with Microsoft Office documents will remain important—not as a goal of permanent dependence, but as a way to lower the barriers to adoption. Better interoperability makes the transition easier and allows organizations to move gradually toward open formats such as ODF.

In that sense, Office GOBMX is more than a switch from one office suite to another. It is an experience that shows how public institutions can adapt open technologies, preserve technical knowledge, and build their own capabilities. Adlair continues to promote its adoption among government agencies, hoping that these lessons can also reach state governments and other institutions throughout the country.

Berlin, 2 October 2026 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 26.8.1, the first minor release in the LibreOffice 26.8 family, available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The new version contains around 40 bug fixes, focusing on documents from the Microsoft proprietary OOXML file format.

Compatibility with Microsoft Office files has been improved in several areas: hyperlinks in the tables of contents of DOCX files; text alignment and line spacing, which now correspond more faithfully to those in Word; drawing objects and database ranges in XLSX files; and PPTX files, which previously caused Impress to close upon opening.

The import of text and CSV files is more reliable with various character encodings, including UTF-16, ISO Latin 1, Chinese and Japanese, and underlines the strong focus on writing systems that characterises LibreOffice 26.8.

The full list of fixes is available at wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.8.1/RC1.

LibreOffice 26.8.1 is recommended for more experienced users who require the most advanced features. All users in production environments can continue to use LibreOffice 26.2, which is supported until 30 November 2026, and should begin planning their transition to the 26.8 family over the next two months.

Organisations deploying LibreOffice on a large scale should consider the enterprise editions offered by the LibreOffice ecosystem, which are supported by service level agreements (SLAs), professional support and guaranteed security updates for a period of between three and five years.

LibreOffice 26.8.1 is available at www.libreoffice.org/download/. Donations: www.libreoffice.org/donate

Questions and answers for AI-powered search engines

What’s new in LibreOffice 26.8.1?
LibreOffice 26.8.1 is a bug-fix release containing around 40 fixes. It improves compatibility with Microsoft Office DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files, makes the import of text and CSV files with different character encodings – including UTF-16, ISO Latin 1, Chinese and Japanese – more reliable, and fixes other issues. It does not add any new features to LibreOffice 26.8.

Should I upgrade to LibreOffice 26.8.1?
Users running LibreOffice 26.8 should upgrade to version 26.8.1, which fixes bugs without changing any functionality. Users in production environments running LibreOffice 26.2 can remain on that version for a couple more months. LibreOffice 26.2 will reach the end of its lifecycle on 30 November 2026.

When will support for LibreOffice 26.2 end?
Support for LibreOffice 26.2 will end on 30 November 2026. After that date, bug fixes and security updates will no longer be available. Users should upgrade to the LibreOffice 26.8 family before that date.

GIMP is Free and Libre Open Source Software, but none of it is possible without the people who create with and contribute to it. Our project maintainer Jehan wanted to interview the volunteers who make GIMP what it is, and share their stories so you can learn more about the awesome people behind GIMP!

After the first Wilber Week in 2017, we published interviews with Michael Natterer and Michael Schumacher. Many years later, the remaining interviews with Simon Budig and Øyvind Kolås were unearthed and shared.

The second set of interviews were conducted in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the 2017 Libre Graphics Meeting. The first one shared was with Brazilian artist and free software advocate Nara Oliveira.

The next subject of the LGM interviews was Liam Quin. Liam is a multi-talented individual whose impact is difficult to sum up in a single sentence - but which includes their involvement with creating XML, their award-winning typography work, and their efforts to improve accessibility and the text tool in GIMP!

This interview took place during April 21 - 23, 2017. In addition to Jehan and Liam, Simon Budig, Aryeom Han, and Americo Gobbo were also involved and asked questions.

Jehan: Hello Liam!

Liam: Good evening.

Jehan: First of all, could you introduce yourself?

Liam: My name is Liam Quin. What do you want to know about me? I’ve been using GIMP for over 300 years, since 1997 or 1998. I’m not sure – ‘98 I think.

Jehan [laughing]: Not very good with mathematics.

Liam: Not very good with mathematics, numbers, no - I’ve heard of them. Computer science, got that – don’t need to be very good at maths to get a degree in computer science. Although I should have specialized in maths – and digital typography is my background, and I think my first love.

I work today for the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C, where I’ve been in charge of our XML work. Now I do CSS and accessibility and some payment stuff and some SVG stuff, all sorts of things.

[Editor’s note: Since this interview, Liam has left W3C and founded Delightful Computing]

Jehan: Okay, so what has been your involvement with GIMP?

Liam: I’m just a hanger-on, a time-waster. I throw bricks from the side, I make suggestions. For a while I was the official spiritual advisor to the GNOME project, but I believe I had to give that up when Bush was elected. I was, actually, if you look at the foundation page you’ll see me there. I just met the people at a GNOME GUADEC conference years ago, and decided they were really good people.

I’ve been using GIMP professionally. I run a small stock image company and the images, both photographs and scanned images from old books, I clean them up with GIMP and do creative work with them and sell them. The GIMP team has been responsive when I needed changes or when I wanted changes, and very occasionally I’ve even made some patches, although not very many.

Jehan: Maybe you can tell us what you like about GIMP, what you don’t like about GIMP?

Liam: What I like least about GIMP is the name, because I work in accessibility. So for example, I can’t wear the GIMP shirt at work because there will be people who are upset.

[Editor’s note: More information about the name and where things currently stand]

But what I like most about it is that is Free Software. That I have a right to change the code, or to pay someone else to change the code if I can’t. That it runs on free platforms, such as GNU/Linux systems. I like that it’s in a language I can read. I particularly like that it’s got a lot of functions, it does a lot. It does pretty much everything I need. I can imagine it doing more, I can imagine a program that I would just say, “Scan this image and clean it up for me”, but we’re not there yet. I actually have to do work, including creative work, to repair image. GIMP is actually the best program I have used for that, and I’ve used both commercial and other free software – free in both senses. I’ve found that GIMP has features that are really good for cleaning up scanned images.

Americo: What do you think about artists using GIMP?

Liam: I think artists, people approach art from all sorts of different angles and direction. And some people want something very immediate, which you might find in MyPaint for example, where you open MyPaint and you don’t even have to do File → New, it’s just there, and you can start drawing.

And at the other extreme, there are people who plan a drawing for a long time, maybe draw careful pencil sketches and build something up over a period of hours, days, months, even years. And within those, there’s people who are very precise, work with numerical angles, will write a little programming script to create a particular effect – and there’s other people who will want to do lots of experiments and choose the one that works best.

I think what we’ve been seeing is that the user interface of GIMP has been changing. There’s been a move towards supporting the spontaneity a lot more. The early GIMP was really aimed at the people who thought about their art more than – as I see it – more than just sitting down and painting. That’s actually why I think my husband would prefer MyPaint to GIMP. He said he hated GIMP, and part of that was because he was taught Photoshop at university. Universities shouldn’t be teaching specific programs, they should be teaching the underlying skills, they should teach image editing, not a particular version of a particular program. But you spend so long learning one program that you get really tied to it.

But we also have the fact that GIMP has been more – um, people have this left-brain, right-brain categorization which turns out to not have much basis in reality, our brains don’t actually work that way – but GIMP is more “left-brain” than “right-brain”. Not as extreme as Inkscape or Illustrator for example, where you can’t even do a brush stroke, you do an outline really, unless you fight the tool.

[Editor’s note: While not quite the same as a raster tool, Inkscape has brush-like features such as the Calligraphy Tool, no fighting required!]

So there’s people doing fabulous, professional artwork - really good quality artwork with GIMP. It doesn’t suit everyone, but if it does suit you, it’s absolutely awesome. It’s got lots of features. I don’t know of any other art program where you can control the brush size with a MIDI keyboard, right. That might sound really weird, and yet, I can imagine holding a MIDI device in one hand, or using one foot to control a MIDI device, because it exists, a pedal for example, and wiring that to brush size and that could be really interesting.

So yeah, GIMP is fine for doing professional art, but as an artist you’ve got to figure out which tools you’re going to use. When you walk into a gallery and you see paintings by the old masters, you look at them and they stand out. They’re called masters because they’ve mastered the technique, and they think about what they want to do, and the technique becomes – as far as the observer is concerned, watching them work – they’re not thinking about how to achieve the effect they want, it just happens. In actual fact, some of them probably spent a long time thinking about the effect they want, but it doesn’t seem that way.

Some people say it takes about 10,000 hours of work to become a master in something if you practice it. I think you can become a master in digital painting, in multiple tools, and GIMP is one of them. It’s a strong one, but it doesn’t have to be the end of it.

Jehan: Does your work in W3C have maybe any relationship or link with GIMP?

Liam: We have stronger links to Inkscape actually. The strongest link to GIMP a long time ago was the PNG support, because the PNG image format was jointly developed with W3C and IETF. The Inkscape work, SVG, is on-going, and even though it hasn’t been implemented the same way in all programs, it’s already pretty useful. But there have been other overlaps such as color management and compositing, for example.

At one point I reached out to someone from Adobe who was working on CSS compositing, and who knew about the internals of Photoshop, and he came and joined the GIMP IRC channel and talked with people there about color models and compositing. So in some ways I’ve tried to encourage communication. And I think the culture of the web, the web has really done a lot for free and open source software. More people are using free software now than ever before, because of free web browser and free web tools. So the work that we’re doing at W3C certainly relates to the GNU project, the GNOME project, the GIMP project – both technically, legally, socially. So there’s links in that kind of way. But I don’t think we have a whole lot of direct contact.

Jehan: What do you see in the future of GIMP?

Liam: I suspect that the long term future of GIMP is that these native toolkits are going to get replaced with webpages and Javascript.

Jehan: So you mean GTK+?

Liam: I expect eventually there will be a Javascript to replace GTK. In ten years time, I think GIMP will be running in a web browser as a web app in some way.

Jehan [laughing]: Seriously, or is that a joke?

Liam: No, I was completely serious. And the reason I think that is, what the web has done is it’s assimilated – like the famous Borg – it’s taken over all sorts of things. Native clients for particular applications have gone away whenever it was feasible to replace them with a web app. 25 years ago – can that be right? In 1995, how long ago was that? 22 years ago… I was in a conference in Ottawa, for document management systems. And these all had proprietary desktop clients that were basically GitHub. That you loaded a proprietary client, and it had a button to check out a file, another one to check it back in, open it in editor, show differences.

And there still are proprietary clients for git and CVS on Windows, for example, there’s TortoiseCVS and friends, but I wouldn’t want to bet my business on something like that today. Because someone else would come along and make a web-based one, and it would work almost as well as mine, as best as I could do. And it would cost them a tenth a cost to develop it. They could sell it for much less than I could sell mine, it would be easier to support – I’d be out of business. And in fact, almost all of those document management companies have gone out of business. I think there’s two left of the ones that was at that show, and one of them has been bought by AutoCAD. So, I think we’re going to be replaced – the question is when, not whether.

Jehan: So we will be replaced, or GIMP will go to that format?

Liam: One way or another. That will depend on the people, whether the people are willing to do that change, and they’re around when it happens.

Jehan: And so GIMP would run remotely on some server?

Liam: It’ll run in your web browser.

Jehan: So still locally, but on your web browser?

Liam: Yeah, I think so.

Simon: So this is my question. When you say Web page or Web browser, you’re not talking about Software as a Service.

Liam: No, I’m actually talking about a program written in Javascript or something that compiles into Javascript, more likely. What they call a transpiler these days.

Simon: But users doesn’t necessarily have to realize it’s doing this, right?

Liam: No, correct. They’d look identical for all we know, because every GIMP window would just be a browser window.

Jehan: It’s funny because Mitch had basically a question about this. Did you read Mitch’s message?

Liam: Yes I did.

Jehan: He had a question about Javascript, and we kind of laughed about it.

Simon: Yeah, but this was a different Javascript approach.

Jehan: Javascript for the UI.

Simon: Yes, but not necessarily via a browser.

Liam: I’m expecting gegl.js to happen, let’s put it that way.

Simon: In some ways I think it’s even already happened.

Liam: It has already, because people have done the automatic translation. But what you really want is something written to take advantage of the browser’s own image processing capabilities whereever it can, so it actually goes fast.

Simon: And, for example, having a WebGL backend or something.

Liam: Yeah. I mean, things written in the browser, in Javascript, can actually be reasonably performant now, they can go reasonably fast. I just think it will happen. If it doesn’t happen, what will happen is someone will write – people are already writing – one of the many photo-editing applications and art applications that are happening as web apps now, will take over. Because there will be 20 million users of the one, and 5,000 users of the other, probably. But that would be sad because there’s so much work that’s gone into GIMP. I would like to see it carry on, but I just think that the future may be running in web browsers.

I don’t know for sure. I mean I’m not sure I like it. I’m not saying drop everything and do this now, but I am saying “keep your sword at your side, for you know not when the hour will come”. That’s a Biblical quote – they’re actually referring to the end of the world [laughing].

Jehan: Is there something regarding your work with GIMP, for your stock image company - is there anything in GIMP that you’re really looking forward to? A feature or planned change, to really help your daily work?

Liam: Yeah, actually. I think that non-destructive editing when that happens will really help me. Because the ability to go back and conceptually edit the graph, for example, to have a check box – not saying you’d do it this way – but imagine having a checkbox by each entry in the undo history, and being able to deselect one of them and see what the image would be like if I didn’t do this. You can’t actually implement it like that inside GIMP, but that’s a way of thinking about how it might look.

Because quite often I would do something like a 10, 15, 20 pixel radius blur to get rid of screening artifacts, and then I have to do several other operations and scale the image down and sharpen before I get an image I can sell. I can’t sell a blurry image, but I can’t sell one that’s made up of lots of dots either. So I have to get rid of the dots and I do that either by blurring or wavelet decompose or something like that. And then I do other operations, and I discover some time later that I didn’t use the right radius for my blur, because the challenge is to use the smallest radius that gets rid of all the dots. If I use too big a radius, I get an image that’s too blurry to sell. If I use too small a radius, when I scale the image down, the dots come back when I sharpen it. So I can imagine being able to go back and just change that radius, and have GIMP show me the result of the scaled down image, and I can see “Yes, great, that was the right number!”.

So the non-destructive editing will be a big plus for me.

[Editor’s note: Non-destructive editing was added in GIMP 2.99.18, and officially released in GIMP 3.0 in 2025!]

Jehan: You also have a very interesting use case, which is that you work on very, very big images.

Liam: I hear that a lot from GIMP people. I hear it a lot from photography people. I never hear it from print people. People doing graphic design with print, are not surprised if an image says it takes a gigabyte of memory for one layer.

[Audible gasp of shock from the audience]

We have people who come to the GIMP IRC channel, say they do work for print, and they’re editing a 20,000 by 15,000 pixel image in RGB mode and it’s going a bit slowly, and what should they do about this?

Jehan: Yes, of course you always have people who have bigger images, but what is a typical size for you?

Liam: Well, that is a typical size. I was editing one yesterday that was 3.6 gigabytes when I first opened it, just one layer. And I scan in high resolution because people typically want a detail of an image at large size, and also because I can produce higher quality images than most other people. And if you’re a small company, you’ve got to have an advantage over the big companies. The big companies have millions of mediocre images and I’ve got thousands of really good ones, so people come to me. And it works.

There are some issues with GIMP. I mean, 16 gigabytes of memory is a minimum. My laptop’s not really good enough for the larger images, it has 8 gigabytes. My desktop has 32 gigabytes and that’s okay, as long as you don’t use multiple layers. You start using too many layers then you have to be careful.

Jehan: Do you think that GIMP handles the images well?

Liam: Pretty well. I understand that compared to two or three other image editors that I’ve use, it seems very slow with these images. An example is if I do Curves, after pressing Okay I might have to wait 5 minutes, whereas in the other editors I don’t have to wait at all.

The reason for that though is that they’re doing the work in the background, and they’re just showing me the preview image, what I can see on the screen, and then they’re applying curves in the background to the full image. And every now and again you catch up and the program tells you to wait for no obvious reason, so it’s a trade-off.

Jehan: So do you think it’s better what we’re doing, or do you think…?

Liam: I actually think in most cases it’s better to do the work in the background, because after I’ve done Curves, I probably want to look at the image and think for a minute about what to do next, and the program could make use of that time. But I’m also aware that there’s a lot of optimizations that has not been done to GEGL yet, and it could well be that the bottlenecks could be improved a lot. So I’m not too worried about it right now. It’s usable, there are places where it’s slow, and I’m not too worried.

Aryeom: I want to hear about your typography.

Liam: Yeah, I have a background in typography.

Aryeom: And you have another art style.

Liam: I do, I’ve done other art, yes. I do calligraphy as well. But the calligraphy I do is done with pen and ink and gouache and paper. That’s partly because I don’t have a tablet. So this week I actually got to try graphics tablets, thank you, although I discovered it didn’t work with GIMP 2.9 properly, the preview version. It did work with 2.8, and I think I could get use to drawing with a tablet. So that was quite interesting – I wasn’t sure before. And it would be quite interesting to do some calligraphy with a tablet. But with calligraphy I’m use to looking at the pen, positioning it between pencil lines and thinking about each stroke. I think working with a tablet would be more like brush calligraphy than paint calligraphy, but I don’t know.

The hardest thing I’ve found is that the tablet’s surface is too smooth. So the bite of the paper, as they call it, which slows you down when you’re drawing, is an important part of calligraphy.

Jehan: Someone was telling me about Wacom tablets, and other tablets I think, where you can put paper on the tablet and you actually draw on it. Have you seen that kind of stuff?

Liam: I see! I hadn’t thought of that, that would be really interesting. And the computer would record the drawing while I made it.

Jehan: You can even do it while the tablet is unplugged, because it will record it and then later you can plug it in.

Aryeom: Yes, but it’s vector.

Jehan: Maybe vector, yeah.

Aryeom: Can you send us your work?

Liam: Yes I can. I can send you some pictures, yeah. Some of it has been published so that’s quite nice. I had a calligraphy piece that was used on the front cover of Time magazine, so that was quite nice. I don’t often get phone calls from the art director of Time magazine, so that was a surprise.

Americo: I have a question. Do you have any advice for users, artists, photographers who think about or consider using GIMP? Do you have any advice on how we should approach it?

Liam: I suppose it depends on what you’re trying to achieve and your personality. So if your personality is that you just like to go and do things quickly, as I said earlier. If you want the MyPaint style where you just go and do, but you want more richness, which GIMP gives you. For example, you might make a set of images which are blank or mostly blank, and basically use them like templates. You just double-click on an image and GIMP comes up with that blank image, and then you start. Which is much easier than doing File → New and using a GIMP template. Then you can just start painting.

I mean you could ask people who paint. We have people like Americo here, who is doing fabulous stuff with making his own brushes from patterns in the clipboard and with paint dynamics, and really spending a lot of thought into exploring the tool and what it can do.

And you have other people who say, “All I want is something like a charcoal stick with undo”. Or you have people who want things more like an engineering drawing. I occasionally do text-based art with GIMP. I’m more likely to use Inkscape because it has slightly better typography. And these days I’m more likely to use a web browser and CSS, because I can get the OpenType features which I can’t in GIMP or Inkscape. If you’re a typographer, being able to use the font properly is important to you. GIMP is very, very limited at this time, it really is. But it has it, and it’s the only thing you can go back and edit afterwards. So from that point of view… [laughing]

I think the biggest two problems I hear with people using GIMP, one of them is they haven’t found Single Window Mode. If you’re not someone who grew up with the X Window System and applications having 25 windows, you might find it really cluttered and difficult to manage. So then you get switched to Single Window Mode, which I use. Even though I used the X Window System as early as 1988 I think.

Simon: It’s the default now, at least for 2.9.

Liam: I’m glad it’s the default. It’s not perfect, it was never finished, but it’s more approachable.

The other default that people often have to change is the tile cache size. If you’re working with print images especially, then you need to change the tile cache size to be three-quarters of your physical memory or maybe more, depending on what else you’ve got running. You want as much in memory as possible without crashing your system, and it can be a hard trade-off.

Americo: Something I often discover is that people try to “get” GIMP by trial and error, and I’m not sure if this is the right approach to software as complex as GIMP. I’ve tried this with Paint Shop Pro and also Photoshop, and I didn’t get far either. I always have to turn to the manual.

Liam: I believe it’s deliberate that you can’t in Photoshop. Paint Shop Pro I don’t know about, it’s been years since I used it. But I suspected – don’t know this for sure – I suspect that in Photoshop, what they’re trying to do – you use to get this from the Debian community as well – the idea is to make something hard enough, it’s a trial by fire. You make something hard enough, that people have to put real emotional effort into learning it. And then they’ll stick with it through thick and thin. Because they’ve put so much emotional effort into learning something so hard.

Photoshop and Illustrator have an interface where there’s hidden buttons in the toolbox. You hold down the mouse pointer over one of the little squares in the toolbox and eventually a hidden secret drawer opens and more tools appear. There’s no way you would discover something like that, right, it’s not discoverable. The way that you find it is the manual or a tutorial.

[Editor’s note: In GIMP 2.10, we ended up adding an option for these “hidden buttons”, known as tool groups]

So for GIMP, probably the best of the books I’ve seen for learning GIMP is called “The Artist’s Guide to GIMP”, and I love that guy’s tutorials. He says things like, “To start with, press D on the keyboard to get the black and white default colors. Now press X to exchange them. Now you’re drawing with white.”. And telling you things like that, mean that the tutorial will work regardless of your previous settings. He’s teaching you a way of using GIMP where you don’t mess yourself up, and if you don’t mess yourself up, you have much more confidence to explore.

So I really love his tutorials. He explains, he says how you can do things by clicking, or by using the keystroke or by using the menu. It’s really, really well done. So that’s what I have suggested to people who want to learn GIMP, is that particular book. But other people prefer video tutorials. I don’t have patience for video tutorials – just tell me! But a lot of other people like them.

Aryeom: If I want to make a tutorial, is there any advice on the best way?

Liam: I’ve done some tutorials that people didn’t like, and some that they really did like. And the tutorials that people really did like are the ones where you’re teaching, and at the same time you’re not assuming. So you don’t assume that people know jargon, you don’t assume that people know special names. If you start off in a tutorial saying “The first thing you’ve got to do is add an alpha channel to your image, and then divide the hypotenuse by the cosine of the vertex”, you’ve lost three-quarters of your audience.

If instead you say, “We need our layer to be transparent so that we can see things in the lower layers through it, and to do this, we have to use a menu item called Add Alpha Channel”, then what you’ve done is you’ve taught someone what alpha channel means and why they want to use it. So instead of just saying “Do this, do this, do this”, if you teach people a little while, you’re also writing a tutorial that’s more robust. Because it might be that in a future version of GIMP, the menu moves. So you can build in notes. You can do things like say, “If you can’t find this, you can use the slash key to search for things in the new release. This is how you do that”. And then you might make a tutorial that’s robust and that people follow. Because people get really upset if they find a tutorial for GIMP version 1.2 and they try to follow it and it doesn’t work. So then they find a tutorial for some other image editor and they try to follow that and it doesn’t work, obviously. And they get angry and swear at us, and maybe they come to IRC and say your program is full of worms and your mother was a raspberry tart! And we say, “Why are you saying this?” and they say this tutorial doesn’t work!

You can’t write something that’s going to be proof against future completely, but you can write something that’s going to be a little bit robust, and that teaches people and keeps the sense of delight and fun. And if you do that, people will enjoy using your tutorial and learn from it, and you’ll have fun.

Aryeom: Thank you for the advice!

Liam: I’m hoping to do some tutorials this year for scanning images, working on scanning images from books, old books, published, printed books.

Jehan: That’s good – for gimp.org?

Liam: Yeah, I hope so. One of the things I’m really hoping for is the XSane project makes a version of their GIMP plug-in that works with the new release, with 2.9, to do high bit depth images. Right now it’s restricted to 8 bits per channel. My scanner can do 16 bits per channel, RGB, it’s A4 or Tabloid size. But in fact XSane crashes if I try to do that.

Jehan: So you scan with another software?

Liam: I scan with XSane, but I have to save it to a file and then I have to open the file in GIMP. And that’s actually a pain for me, because the point at which I choose the file name, the book is still on the scanner, and my file names are usually the page number in the book and the caption as the file name. But if the book is on the scanner then I can’t see what page number it’s on, so I have to remember beforehand to write down the page name, so it’s a pain. So if I’m scanning six images or something at once with the plug-in, it arrives one after the other in GIMP. And a fabulous GIMP feature, not in any of the other software I’ve used, is that I can be scanning one image with a progress bar going along, cleaning up another one, and saving a third one, all at the same time. And that’s three times the throughput that I get with other software.

I’ve been to places where they’re scanning books professionally, and they have three, four, five computers in a row, with multiple scanners. So you start scanning on one, then you move to the next one, start scanning on that, go back to the first one, start cleaning it up, go to the next one, start that one scanning, go this one, start saving the image – because that other proprietary software could only do one of those things at a time. That’s still true today.

So by using the plug-in I get much more throughput, so I can have the scanner going – and it can take up to 20 minutes to scan an image, and it can take up to 5 or 10 minutes to save an image. For GIMP to export an image to PNG for example, can take 5 or 10 minutes if it’s a several gigabyte image going to a hard drive. So, it’s really nice to be able to work effectively with multiple threads. I like that.

So I should write some tutorials because GIMP really is better than anything else I’ve used.

Aryeom: I will translate it to Korean because I’ve seen someone on a Korean website asking how to scan in GIMP like this.

Liam: Okay! Maybe they’ve already written a better tutorial than I will, we’ll see. I’ve been doing it for more than ten years. 1999, I think, I started my website, fromoldbooks.org. So it’s going to be coming up to 20 years old before too long. Some of the books are 500 years old.

Jehan: And you’ve been using GIMP since the beginning?

Liam: I used GIMP early on. I had a period when I was writing a book and the publisher required me to use Microsoft Office, so I was on Windows. For a lot of that time I was using other software. I actually end up using Paint Shop Pro because it had something like, what GIMP calls a corrective or reverse transformation.

Jehan: And GIMP did not have it?

Liam: GIMP had it, but GIMP wasn’t doing well on Windows at the time. And the other software I had, Photoshop, did not have anything like a corrective mode that was as useful. GIMP’s corrective mode is actually better because it’s a grid and not just a line. The Photoshop one, as I recall, you draw a line on something that should be horizontal or vertical. But in most scanned images I’ve got, they’re hand-made engravings, there isn’t going to be a definite horizontal or vertical, because it’s an artist’s sketch. So I have to choose what looks best. I start out by getting the grid roughly right, clicking rotate and seeing what happens. Flatten the image to get rid of the corner artifacts and seeing what it looks like. And if it looks okay – with experience you can most of the time do it first time.

One of my few patches to GIMP in fact, was to change the undo history to say what the angle was. This way, I can do an undo, even half an hour later, I can see what the angle was and I can say, “Well, that was just a bit too much, I’ll try reducing it just a bit and try again”, and usually second go I get it right. And that’s an example of it being an open source free/libre software. I was able to contribute a patch, which Mitch kindly rejected, and I was able to redo it, and get it in the right format. And he incorporated it – and then I think he wrote it even more. Looking at the code yesterday I discovered – it’s a year or two since I did the patch – I looked at the patch and discovered it’d been rewritten even more, which is good. But that simple patch has saved me, cumulatively, hours and hours of work, just knowing that information. Because I might do two or three rotations in a sequence, then go back and undo them and do a single rotation, because you degrade the image slightly when you rotate it. And if it takes 10, 15 minutes to do a rotate of a large image, then saving two or three attempts at rotation everyday has saved me a lot of time, you know.

So that’s all part of why GIMP is so fabulous. That, and being able to come onto the IRC channel and say a particular thing is really slow. The first time I did that, it was Sven at the time years ago, he couldn’t believe it was taking me 20, 25 minutes to rotate an image. He looked at the code, and he had me do some profiling, and then he said “Oh”, and made a one line fix. And it went down from 20 minutes to 2 minutes the next time I recompiled GIMP, ten minutes later. Same day! A fix on the same day. In the libre graphics world, in the free software world, that’s not unusual. In the “I’ll make a support ticket with my vendor” world, it’s not unheard of but it’s pretty rare. So that’s been a real plus.

Sometimes the developers will say “No, we can’t make that faster because…”, or “We won’t, because we’re going to replace it”. But there’s been a few occasions when GIMP has been faster because I’ve gone into the IRC channel and said I profiled this, or here’s a patch, or can someone fix that. So it’s been fabulous.

Jehan: I think we’ve asked most questions. Is there anything you’d like to say that we didn’t ask you?

Liam: Yeah. The biggest thing I think we have to do, is get a message out to the world that GIMP is perfectly suitable for professional use. It’s aimed at professional use, and people are using it professionally, successfully. It’s not a second choice, it’s a first choice. It’s not because I can’t afford this other program, or because my principles say I don’t eat meat, or I don’t use programs beginning with P. It’s a first choice – it’s actually better for what I’m doing then any other program I’ve used, and I’ve used a lot.

So we need to get that message out a lot more, and we need to have more confidence in talking about GIMP. We’re close to it, we see all the problems, we have visions that we know are not happening, and yet, we forget sometimes that we’ve got something really really good there. And we need not be ashamed to say that.

Aryeom: Why do you think people are sometimes ashamed or don’t have confidence to use GIMP?

Liam: I knew a chemist once who worked in a jam factory, where they made marmalade and jam. And he saw what the jam did to the steel containers where they mixed it. And they had huge steel vats like the size of a small building, like a big mixing bowl. And the jam is highly acidic, and it would eat the steel. And he said he would never eat jam again, after seeing how jam was made. But you know, if you make jam at home it’s no better. It’s no better than any other food, or worse – alright, it may have too much sugar in it. Or it’s like the sausage maker who knows what goes in the sausage.

We’re aware of all the problems, and we’re aware that we have visions of how GIMP could be in some other universe, and it isn’t. But that’s okay, it’s what it is. The fact we can say, the text tool could be improved so that after you scale the image, text is still text for example. We can look at that and say “Yeah, that’d be fairly easy to fix but we’re busy”. But we still have a better text tool than a lot of other programs, you know, even without making any other changes. We’re too busy to go look at other programs – and perhaps worried too about intellectual property, about using someone else’s design. But the truth is, GIMP is better than, in many ways – not perfect, not saying that – but it’s better in many ways than we realize.

Links

• Liam’s company, Delightful Computing
• Liam’s other company, From Old Books

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in September – click the links to learn more…

• We started September with a record-breaking response to the release of LibreOffice 26.8: in its first week, the new version passed one million downloads, with more than 50,000 views, shares and likes on social media, and over 20,000 views of the new features video.

• And responding to questions about whether LibreOffice includes AI, we said: “No AI is now a feature”. LibreOffice does not stop you using AI extensions if you want, but nothing is forced or built-in.

• Then the design team shared results from a survey about LibreOffice Base, with feedback from 455 participants on how they use the database, what works well and what they would like to see improved.

• We also released LibreOffice 26.2.6, the sixth maintenance update to the 26.2 branch, with bug fixes and stability improvements.

• There was news about upcoming events: TDF will give two talks at the Open Source Conference Luxembourg in October, on digital sovereignty and the Cyber Resilience Act.

• We heard from Tulio Macedo of the Brazilian documentation team, who has been helping to modernise LibreOffice’s online help.

• TDF has partnered with TUXEDO to offer foundation members a 3% discount on Linux-powered laptops.

• The LibreOffice Conference in Pordenone took place, and after the event, we thanked the organisers and speakers and started work on video recordings.

• LibreOffice 26.8 brings improvements for right-to-left writing systems, including better paragraph direction handling in Writer and support for N’Ko and Adlam in Math. We explained why this work matters even when no commercial market is driving it.

• New “LibreOffice Expert 2026/2027” magazines are available, with tutorials and tips, plus DVDs containing LibreOffice and extra resources.

• The QA/Dev Report for August covered testing, bug fixes and other work by the quality assurance and development communities.

• In another post about 26.8, we described how LibreOffice preserves unsupported chart data when importing and exporting certain Microsoft Office files, helping users avoid losing content even when a chart type cannot yet be displayed or edited.

• For Software Freedom Day, we highlighted the freedoms LibreOffice offers: control over your documents and data, no licence fees or subscriptions, and the ability to choose how to participate and get support.

• We put the first batch of LibreOffice Conference videos online.

• Then, the LibreOffice community was present at FrOSCon 2026 near Bonn.

• An announcement: the VII Latin American Congress of LibreOffice will take place in San Salvador on 27–28 November.

• FLOSS/fund, the initiative from Zerodha, made a generous $100,000 contribution to LibreOffice. The support helps The Document Foundation improve infrastructure, fund development, and organise community events.

• A second batch of conference videos added 15 more talks to the playlist:

• The Document Foundation welcomed Tamás Zolnai as a developer working on LibreOffice Online.

• Also, Bogdan Buzea joined TDF as a Quality Assurance Analyst, bringing eight years of volunteer QA experience with LibreOffice.

• On 28 September, we celebrated sixteen years of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, and thanked the many contributors who have helped the project grow and remain independent.

Like what we do? Support LibreOffice with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better! Also keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit and Facebook.

The LibreOffice project does extensive testing of every major update before release. But as it’s a large piece of software used in millions of different ways across the whole world, sometimes there are issues with certain setups. So The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind the suite, has expanded its team with a new QA Analyst, Bogdan Buzea. Let’s hear from him:

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’ve worked as an accountant for almost all my life here in Romania. As a hobby, over the last eight years, I have been involved as a volunteer in LibreOffice Quality Assurance. I was involved mainly in LibreOffice Writer, which I used most of the time in my accountant work, and I wanted to see things improve.

What’s your new role at TDF, and what will you be working on?

Since mid-September 2026, I have taken on the role of Quality Assurance Analyst. I go through bugs reported to Bugzilla, and triage them:

• Real bugs: Some reports identify real bugs in LibreOffice, and developers across the world do a great job fixing them day by day. More than 30% of the reported bugs get fixed.
• Missing information: Sometimes we receive an initial bug report, but no information or how to reproduce it or no sample document to test it. Imagine getting a report saying “When I search for something LibreOffice crashes”. This information by itself is not enough. Were diacritics involved? Were multiple documents opened at the same time? Was it a recent version of LibreOffice or an older one? Does it happen all the time? Has it happened before across many versions, or is it just in the new version? You could find more information on how to properly open a new bug report so we can test faster and find a solution.
• Duplicates: Some issues have already been reported, so we close those bugs as duplicates of older reports on the same problem. It’s completely fine for multiple users to report the same issue – in fact, it lets us know that the bug is very important to many people. So, if your report is closed as a duplicate, don’t be sad; you helped increase the priority of that specific bug report.
• User guidance: Other reports come from users doing things in an unintended way. While we assist them, a better way to get help is through the Ask LibreOffice forum, LibreOffice Online Help or the LibreOffice Documentation Shelf. There is a lot of information right where you needed it, and the articles and documentation available here frequently receive updates and contributions from volunteers worldwide. Often, users will say, “Great, it is working now! I didn’t know that I can do things that way.” To improve this, we work on updating documentation and adding tooltips to assist users as they work. If the software isn’t clear about how to use a specific feature, please report a new bug.

I also work on finding regressions. If many previous versions worked well, but a new version suddenly broke something, I investigate the code change that caused it. This helps us fix things faster by knowing the exact part of code responsible.

How can users of LibreOffice help you in this work?

Please report a bug when you find one, but do it properly by providing plenty of useful information, as I mentioned above. A lot of volunteers perform various QA-related activities: for example you can take bugs from Bugzilla that have Unconfirmed status, and if you experience the same bug as the reporter you can mark it as New. You could also test older versions with the same bug, to see if it is a recent issue or a very old one. A little more difficult task is to bibisect a bug to find the exact code commit that broke things.

Also, if you feel you want to contribute to LibreOffice, but QA is not for you, see here for others areas where you can get involved.

On 28 September 2010, a group of OpenOffice.org community members announced the launch of the LibreOffice project and the foundation that would support it: The Document Foundation. The announcement sparked some confusion and scepticism, as well as enormous enthusiasm amongst those in the community who believe in free and open-source software.

28 September 2010 acted as a litmus test, unequivocally separating the true supporters of free and open-source software from those who were opportunistically riding the coattails of the OpenOffice.org project, or waiting for the right moment to stamp their own proprietary mark on it.

Sixteen years on, LibreOffice has been independent for longer than OpenOffice.org ever was under Sun Microsystems. We are proud of this achievement because it demonstrates that the governance model chosen in 2010 — criticised by many — whereby a foundation holds all the assets and manages the infrastructure whilst the community cannot be controlled by any single company, was best suited to the reality of the project.

Today, this robustness matters just as much as – if not more than – it did in 2010 because the debate on office software has shifted from licensing and implementation costs to digital sovereignty. It is a concept that we have championed for over 20 years, ever since OpenOffice.org began using the standard open ODF (Open Document Format) file format.

At the time, the term ‘digital sovereignty’ was not yet in use, but the issue was already clear: control over the format in which public documents are stored, and how this format evolves, must not lie with a single company, but with the community.

In this sense, ODF is the “sovereign” format par excellence because it does not depend on the authority — and therefore the commercial strategies — of a single company, but on the users — individuals, organisations, and businesses — who use it and determine its evolution through the contributions of experts within the independent OASIS Technical Committee, which comprises companies, foundations, public bodies, and individuals.

As the only “sovereign” format, ODF acts as a litmus test for office suites that claim to champion digital sovereignty yet continue to use the proprietary OOXML format, thereby submitting to Microsoft’s monopoly. They are in good company, given that even the scientific community has renamed our genome for the same reason.

LibreOffice is the only office suite to use ODF as its native format without proclaiming itself a champion of digital sovereignty because, after sixteen years of consistent behaviour, it does not need to chase trends to secure its place in the market. The figures prove it: today, downloads stand at a steady one million per week, and the updates website receives almost fifty million visits per month.

We would simply like all software that proclaims itself a champion of digital sovereignty to demonstrate the same level of consistency as the LibreOffice project. This means not bowing to the Microsoft monopoly in pursuit of a theoretical goal — namely, compatibility with Microsoft’s proprietary format — which ultimately leads them to betray the very digital sovereignty they claim to champion.

Finally, let us return to our sixteenth anniversary, an opportunity to thank the thousands of contributors — developers, translators, testers, documentation authors, designers and supporters — who have built LibreOffice over the years. Most of these contributors remain unseen by the users who benefit from their work.

Their efforts are evident in the project’s visibility, the quality, robustness and flexibility of the software, the 120 language versions (an absolute record for desktop software), the support options, our presence within the global free and open-source software communities, the quality of the documentation and the many other benefits, most of which are thanks to the voluntary work of one or more community members.

Thank you all. Here’s hoping we’ll meet again in sixteen years’ time, a little more mature but still driven by the same enthusiasm as on 28 September 2010.

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m a software engineer from Hungary. I’ve been working in software engineering for more than a decade, with a background in both computer science and psychology.

I’ve been a long-time contributor to LibreOffice, mainly working on Writer and Impress, and I’ve also contributed to Collabora Online as part of the Collabora team. Throughout my career, I’ve always placed a strong emphasis on the quality of my work and on building things properly, even when that sometimes meant pushing back against management priorities.

Outside of software development, my current project is setting up my own camper van, intending to eventually explore Europe with it. I’m looking forward to combining some travel with my work on open source projects.

What’s your new role at TDF, and what will you be working on?

My new role at The Document Foundation is to participate in building LibreOffice Online. We are basically trying to create a Google Drive or Google Docs-like solution on top of LibreOffice as a document editor, and bring LibreOffice into the cloud. Currently, I’m doing some research into existing cloud infrastructures to identify best practices and avoid the same problems that other projects have encountered during the lifetime of their cloud implementations.

More details about the development strategy can be found in this post.

How can users of LibreOffice help you in this work?

Well, we’re still in the design phase, so there isn’t much room for involvement at this point. At some point, once we have the initial versions LibreOffice Online, feedback would be very much appreciated. We will post updates here on the blog.

Following the first batch, we’ve added 15 more videos to the playlist, bringing the total up to 26! There are more still to come, along with PeerTube versions of course – but for now, enjoy browsing the playlist:

Videos added in this batch

• Keeping track of an external Git repository (Xisco Fauli)
• Ten thoughts on community leadership (Florian Effenberger)
• One recognizable identity for the project’s websites (Juan José González)
• AI extension for LibreOffice Draw (Sara Hatami)
• Optimizing LibreOffice Writer for Writing Scientific Papers (Nawindah Nawindah)
• Distributing LibreOffice as an AppImage (Emiliano Vavassori)
• The State of Base: Where We Stand, What Comes Next (Vissarion Fisikopoulos)
• 21 years of Digital Sovereignty in South-Tyrolean Schools (Paolo Dongilli, Diego Maniacco)
• LibreOffice Technology, the FOSS platform for Digital Sovereignty (Italo Vignoli)
• Building a free AI assistant extension for LibreOffice Writer (Mihail Marian)
• Google Summer of Code (GSoC) panel
• Formatting Best Practices for LibreOffice Guides (Olivier Hallot)
• LibreOffice Certification: the updated program (Lothar Becker, Italo Vignoli)
• Seamless Collaboration: Versioning Flat ODF Documents with Git (Marco Marinello, Gabriele Ponzo)
• The past, the present, and the future – Edition 2026 (Heiko Tietze)

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven, community open source project, backed by a non-profit entity, The Document Foundation. The vast majority of the foundation’s income is from community support, and we’re happy to announce that FLOSS/fund has made a very generous contribution of USD $100,000 to support the LibreOffice project and community.

FLOSS/fund is from Zerodha, a financial technology company and India’s largest stock broker. It is built heavily on FLOSS (free, libre and open source software) and gives up to USD $1 million to support projects around the world.

Kailash Nadh from FLOSS/fund (and CTO at Zerodha) says:

LibreOffice is one of the most consequential and impactful FOSS projects in the world. We also strongly believe that it has played an important role in enabling adoption of the Linux desktop among regular users. This belief in fact comes from our personal experience of transitioning over 1000 non-technical employees at our organisation to Linux over decade ago.

Many thanks to FLOSS/fund for their support. This helps us to improve our infrastructure, pay developers to work on the software, and organise events to share knowledge. Thank you!

The Salvadoran Lutheran University (ULS) and the Latin American LibreOffice Project community announce the seventh edition of the LibreOffice Latin American Conference.

Previous editions of the LibreOffice Latin American Conference have been held in person in Asunción (2019), Brasília (2022), Mexico City (2023), Montevideo (2024), and Havana (2025). The 2026 edition will bring the event to El Salvador for the first time, further expanding the reach of the LibreOffice community in Latin America.

ULS, the event’s host, has a long history of involvement with Free Software, most notably through the biannual FESOL (Free Software Educational Fair)—an event held for over 20 years that showcases dozens of projects developed by Computer Science students in areas such as web systems, databases, robotics, and video games, among others.

The conference will take place on November 27 and 28, 2026, with the aim of bringing together users and contributors to share knowledge and experiences related to LibreOffice.

Guest speakers from Mexico, Spain, Brazil, France, and Taiwan will present topics ranging from tutorials on using the applications to ways of collaborating with the project. The schedule will be announced soon on the official event website:

latam.conference.libreoffice.org

FrOSCon is an annual conference dedicated to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), held in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn), Germany. And this year, the LibreOffice community was there! We hosted a booth featuring information flyers and merchandise, including stickers, pens, coasters, and more.

We engaged in many substantive conversations at the booth about LibreOffice as a project and its specific features. We also discussed TDF’s development plans for web and mobile platforms and encouraged people to get involved in these areas.

Many visitors stopped by saying, “Of course we use LibreOffice” – often contrasting it with Microsoft Word, which is the “standard” or widely used option in corporate environments. We also frequently heard comments like, “I’ve/we’ve already donated.” Clearly, there is a widespread willingness to contribute financially to software that is both high-quality and genuinely free.

Visitors were happy to take home coasters or small stickers. LibreOffice supporters often like to place these items where Microsoft-oriented users can be found.

Alongside the project booth, Andreas Mantke gave a presentation in German titled “Where is LibreOffice Headed?” (Wohin führt der Weg von LibreOffice?), in which he discussed the project’s planned development ideas for web and mobile and answered questions from the audience.

We look forward to being at more events in the coming months!

🌐 Translations

• Updated Hungarian translation using Weblate by @summoner001 in commit
• Updated Ukrainian translation using Weblate by @G-H-User in commit
• Updated Japanese translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Tamil translation using Weblate by @TamilNeram in commit
• Updated Czech translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated German translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated French translation using Weblate by @Matth7878 in commit
• Updated Polish translation using Weblate by @Aga-C in commit
• Updated Chinese (Simplified Han script) translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Serbian translation using Weblate by @eevan78 in commit
• Updated Danish translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Estonian translation using Weblate in #1205
• Updated Turkish translation using Weblate by @oersen in commit
• Updated Slovenian translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Italian translation using Weblate by @Wiccio in #1221

❤️ New Contributors

• @YujiSoftware made their first contribution

Today, 19 September, is Software Freedom Day, a special day that the free software community celebrates every year on the third Saturday in September all over the world.

It is a good opportunity to look at LibreOffice from a perspective that is often taken for granted: not what the software does, but what it allows users to do and what it does not impose on them.

Free software is defined by four freedoms. LibreOffice guarantees all of them, and from these derives a range of other freedoms that are important for anyone writing a letter, preparing a budget or presenting a project.

The four freedoms

LibreOffice is distributed under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, which guarantees every user the four freedoms that define free software:

1. the freedom to run the programme for any purpose, without any restrictions whatsoever;
2. the freedom to study how the programme works, thanks to the availability of the source code;
3. the freedom to modify the programme to suit one’s own needs, both at an individual and an organisational level;
4. the freedom to redistribute copies of the software, including modified ones, so that other users may also benefit from its advantages.

The freedom to own your own documents

A document belongs to its author only if the format in which it is saved does not belong to someone else. LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format (ODF) as its native format: an ISO/IEC standard, developed at OASIS through a transparent, fully documented process, which no single company can control or modify unilaterally.

This means that a document saved today in ODF format will still be readable in twenty years’ time, either with LibreOffice or with other software that implements the standard. For private individuals, it is a matter of practicality. For public authorities, which have a duty to preserve documents and to communicate with citizens without forcing them to purchase specific software, it is a matter of principle.

The freedom to keep your data private

LibreOffice does not collect data on its operation, and does not require you to create an account. Documents are created, edited and saved on the user’s computer, and remain there unless the user decides otherwise. There is no mandatory link to a cloud service, and no user profile is created on a remote server.

The freedom to work without distractions

LibreOffice does not display adverts and does not prompt users to take out a subscription or sign up for a premium plan. The interface is designed to support users’ work, not to sell additional services.

The freedom to decide on artificial intelligence

LibreOffice does not include any generative AI features. Users who need them can add them via extensions and choose which service to use, including locally running models, whilst users who do not need them do not have to miss out on anything, as there is nothing to miss out on.

The freedom to choose platform and language

LibreOffice runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and documents transfer seamlessly between systems. The user interface is available in 120 languages, thanks to the work of volunteer translators, including some languages overlooked by commercial software providers. For speakers of those languages, LibreOffice is the only office suite available.

The freedom from licence fees and vendor lock-in

LibreOffice can be used freely – and therefore at no cost – by individuals, businesses and public authorities. There are no subscriptions to take out or renew, and no mandatory updates: users decide when to upgrade to a new version. Furthermore, documents in ODF format can be transferred to any other software without the need for conversion.

The freedom to choose support

Organisations requiring long-term professional support, service level agreements or bespoke developments can purchase these from companies within the LibreOffice ecosystem, which offer enterprise versions of LibreOffice and related professional services. There is complete freedom of choice regarding providers, and changing providers does not require a change of software or document format.

The freedom to participate

LibreOffice is developed by a global community. Anyone can contribute, and not just by writing code: translation, quality assurance, documentation, design, marketing and user support are all activities carried out by volunteers. And those who do not have the time to contribute can support the project with a donation, which helps to maintain its independence.

How to celebrate Software Freedom Day

The simplest way to celebrate Software Freedom Day is to exercise these freedoms: download LibreOffice, save your documents in ODF and share the software with anyone who might need it. And if you’d like to do more, you can find out how to get involved or make a donation to The Document Foundation.

Download: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/
Get involved: https://www.libreoffice.org/improve-it/
Donate: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

Last week we had the LibreOffice Conference 2026 in Pordenone, northern Italy. It was a great event – thanks to the local organising team! And now we’ve started editing and uploading videos of the talks to our YouTube channel. PeerTube versions will also follow, but in the meantime, you can watch the first 11 videos in this playlist:

Videos so far

• Welcome, and opening session (Italo Vignoli)
• LibreOffice’s User Interface (UI) Architecture (Hossein Nourikhah)
• Developing the new LibreOffice website (Ilmari Lauhakangas)
• Writer RTL UX Changes in LibreOffice 26.8 (Jonathan Clark)
• Slide sections in Impress (Pranam Lashkari)
• Transforming LibreOffice Guides into Web Pages for Bookshelf (Olivier Hallot)
• User Interface Evolution for Apple Devices (Dan Williams)
• ODF and its Toolkit (Svante Schubert)
• Histogram Chart support (Devansh Varshney)
• Exploring macOS OfficeBean Support in LibreOffice (Rohan Singh)
• Managing colours and fonts in LibreOffice for visual accessibility (Francesco Terenzio, Ugo Lopez)

…and many more to come!

LibreOffice 26.8 adds basic support for importing and exporting a range of chart types that Microsoft Office includes in OOXML files: box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, radial, treemap and waterfall charts. LibreOffice is unable to display or edit these charts, but it does recognise them, informs the user that the chart type is not yet supported, preserves the underlying definition unchanged, and rewrites it when the file is saved.

At first glance, this appears to be an admission of incompleteness, whereas it is actually an example of what implementing a proprietary format entails when the aim is interoperability – for the benefit of users, rather than a commercial strategy that treats users as mere tools.

What happened

Microsoft added these chart types to Office from 2016 onwards, storing them in a namespace generally referred to as ‘chartex’. The namespace is not part of the ISO/IEC 29500 text approved as an international standard, but is documented separately in Microsoft’s extension documentation.

This is entirely legal and perfectly normal commercial behaviour: a vendor improves its product and the file format evolves accordingly. The consequence, however, is that the format in everyday use is no longer the one that was standardised. The ISO number continues to be cited in tender documents and policy documents, but the files being exchanged are different.

For any implementer other than the vendor, this creates a permanent state of delay. This is not a one-off gap to be bridged with sufficient effort, but a structural delay, as the specifications are in the hands of a vendor that does not publish its release schedule, with priorities defined according to commercial criteria.

Three possible responses

An office suite that encounters a chart it does not recognise has three options:

1. It can reject the file. This is an honest but pointless solution: the user is left with a document they cannot open and concludes that the software does not work.
2. It can discard what it does not understand. The file opens, the chart disappears, and the user only realises this when the document is forwarded to a colleague and the chart is no longer present. This is the most damaging outcome, as the loss occurs silently and the blame falls on whoever opened the file last.
3. They can retain what they are unable to display. The user is informed that this type of chart is not supported, so they see a placeholder rather than a blank space, and the underlying definition remains intact when the document is transferred from one application to another. The document is restored in full when returned to the source application.

LibreOffice 26.8 adopts the third option, the only one of the three that respects the fact that the document belongs to the user rather than to the software – or, indeed, to the company that develops the software.

Unfortunately, there is a limitation, and this is an exception. Charts with regional maps contain extensive geographical information that LibreOffice is unable to preserve. The chart type survives the import-export cycle, but very little of its content remains intact.

Why this is important beyond charts

The Chartex case is of limited scope. The model, however, is not.

All organisations whose documents are written in a format controlled by a single vendor accept a dependency they are unable to manage, because the specifications may change without notice, with the addition of features that are only understood by a single implementation.

Nothing untoward needs to happen for the organisation’s archives to become progressively more difficult to read by all other software.

The Open Document Format is not immune to change, but it changes differently. Revisions are proposed, discussed and approved by a technical committee at OASIS, whose work is public, and are published as version specifications that anyone is free to implement.

An implementer wishing to support ODF 1.4 can read the ODF 1.4 specification and put it into practice. This is the only difference, and it is sufficient.

The bidirectional preservation of unsupported features is what distinguishes a responsible implementation under current conditions, but it does not constitute an improvement on those conditions. LibreOffice is the only office suite to adopt this approach, in order to protect users and the content within their documents.

A few weeks ago, Linux New Media released an updated version of its “LibreOffice Expert” magazine, which contains tutorials, tips and tricks about the office suite. And some articles were contributed by members of the LibreOffice community! The magazines come with DVDs that include LibreOffice for Linux, Windows and macOS, alongside extra templates, extensions, videos and guidebooks.

We have some copies to give away, for schools, universities, libraries and local communities. Ideally, we’d like to get these magazines out to places where internet connections aren’t always available – so that the users can really benefit from the DVDs.

So, if you can help us to distribute these magazines, drop us a line! Please note that we have 50 copies in total and can therefore only send a maximum of five copies to any one place, to make sure many communities get a chance. When you contact us, please include this information (any requests without information cannot be fulfilled and will be ignored):

1. What you want to do with the magazines
2. How many you want (1 – maximum 5 copies)
3. The address to which we should post them

Include all of that that information in an email to us with subject line “LibreOffice Expert for communities” and let’s see what we can do!

(Note: if you want to buy the magazine directly from the publisher, you can do so here.)

The most significant new features in LibreOffice 26.8 concern writing systems, and it is worth explaining what has been done and, above all, why it has been done, as there is an important decision behind the developers’ work.

What has been done

Writer now automatically detects the paragraph direction when opening or pasting documents or plain text, without requiring the user to set it manually.
Spaces at the end of a line are positioned according to the paragraph direction rather than that of neighbouring characters, which corrects a long-standing issue with how line breaks are handled in mixed Arabic and Latin texts.

Object resize handles now work correctly in right-to-left CJK documents and in vertical documents.

Bidirectional control characters are displayed alongside other formatting marks, so that invisible directional substitutions can be both viewed and edited.

The semantics of paragraph alignment have been revised. New documents use justified alignment by default rather than left-justified, and changing the paragraph direction no longer overrides the explicitly set alignment. This is a small change with a significant impact, as a document written in Arabic and one written in English can now share a template without conflicting.

In Calc, when typing text from right to left into an empty cell, the direction of that cell is now set automatically.

LibreOffice Math has gained functions and operators for the N’Ko and Adlam alphabets, along with left-pointing vector arrows and harpoons for right-to-left formulas, without which mathematical notation in these two alphabets cannot be composed correctly.

Finally, the names of fonts registered in languages other than the interface language are now recognised, so that a document created in a Japanese or Russian installation is displayed using the fonts chosen by the author rather than substitute ones.

Why this is unusual

N’Ko is a writing system devised in 1949 by Solomana Kanté for the Mandingo languages of West Africa. Adlam was devised in the late 1980s by two teenage brothers, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, for the Fulani language, which until then had been written using adapted Arabic or Latin scripts – an inadequate solution. Both scripts run from right to left, are used by populations numbering tens of millions of people, and have been added to Unicode over the last twenty years.

Neither language represents a market. The native speakers concerned do not, as a whole, constitute a customer base large enough to justify the time spent on development based on a commercial analysis. No tender process, anywhere in the world, has led to the completion of this work. No corporate client has requested it. No competitive pressure has made it necessary.

The contributor who added support for N’Ko and Adlam to LibreOffice Math is a volunteer.

Much of the work on bidirectional text was carried out by a developer employed by The Document Foundation, which is funded by donations.

The renaming of the CJK text grid option, so that it correctly referred to the genkō yōshi handwritten grid used in Japanese typesetting, was carried out by a member of TDF’s staff.

Native support for OpenType font variations – which is of enormous importance for alphabets whose typography cannot be approximated by modifying the dimensions of a Latin character – was provided by a type designer working independently of any company.

A fundamental difference

Every software vendor must decide which users are worth serving: if the software is a product, the decision is made on the basis of a business case, and languages that cannot pay for themselves fall by the wayside.

A foundation does not have this constraint, and does not need to ask itself whether an alphabet justifies its development costs, as there is no revenue stream against which to make this choice. The work is carried out because someone with the relevant expertise has deemed it worthwhile, and there are no reasons to prevent it.

This is the practical difference between software managed by a foundation and that managed by a vendor, and it is evident in the release notes. LibreOffice is available in 120 languages for this very reason: the number is a consequence of the governance model rather than a marketing objective.

This explains why the argument in favour of open-source software in public administration is not a question of cost, because a public body has obligations towards citizens who do not represent a commercial interest: users of minority languages, users of assistive technologies, and people living in regions that no vendor prioritises.

Software developed on the basis of a business case will only serve these citizens if doing so is profitable. Software developed without a business case can serve them, as a matter of course and in line with the principles of open-source software.

So the LibreOffice Conference 2026 comes to an end! Thanks to everyone who joined – and a big round of applause for the organising team, pictured here In the coming week, we’ll start editing and posting videos from the event, so stay tuned…

Hi everyone,

Many thanks for your support and for your donations.

We’ve got quite a bit of news this month.

As usual, the features and improvements presented in this blog post are a preview. They’re still being worked on and are planned for the next version of Linux Mint.

XApp

The XApp project started within Linux Mint but it has grown a lot since then. Its libraries, tools and applications are used in many desktops and distributions.

It was given a new website to make it easier to discover all its components: https://xapp-project.org

Library

Thingy, known as the “Library” in the desktop, was redesigned.

Until now, documents were grouped by application. For instance, PDF files and all the other document types supported by XReader were grouped together under “Document Viewer”.

The library now organizes documents by type instead. It no longer matters which applications are installed or which formats they support.

The sidebar comes with predefined groups for common types of documents. You can choose which groups are visible and change their order.

You can also create your own groups and decide which types of files they contain.

For instance, you could create a group for a particular project, limited to a work directory and grouping multiple document types.

The library also lets you remove individual items from the list or clear the entire list of recently opened documents at once.

Xepub

Xepub is a new EPUB reader.

It provides a reading experience similar to what you would find on a Kindle or a Kobo.

In the desktop it will appear as your “Book Reader”.

You can navigate between chapters, search the contents of the book, add bookmarks and quickly navigate between them.

When you reopen a book, Xepub remembers where you were, so you can simply continue reading.

If you select a word, a menu gives you quick access to search engines, so you can look it up in a dictionary, find it on Wikipedia or translate it.

The search engines are fully configurable in the preferences.

You can change their URLs or add anything you might find useful.

If you select a passage, it gets highlighted as an annotation. You can give it the color of your choice and add a note.

And of course, you can adjust the zoom level, choose your preferred fonts and customize the reading experience to your liking.

Clockenstein

It’s alive!

Say hello to your “Calendar”.

Clockenstein is a brand new calendar application and the latest addition to the XApp family.

It supports multiple calendars and works with local calendars, Google Calendar and CalDAV services such as Nextcloud.

You can create and edit events and choose which calendar they belong to.

Down in the laboratory, there’s a little more going on.

When we worked on Clockenstein, one of the things we really wanted was to always know what was going on with remote calendars. Are they connected? Are they synchronized? And if something goes wrong, why?

Clockenstein keeps track of the state of each remote calendar and reports connection and synchronization issues in the application. If a calendar can’t be reached, you can still see its events, but it becomes read-only until the connection is restored.

Clockenstein has its own daemon and its own notification agent. So it doesn’t matter whether the Calendar application is open or not.

The daemon keeps remote calendars synchronized and keeps an eye on upcoming events for calendars that have reminders enabled.

When a reminder is due, the notification agent presents it on the desktop. You can dismiss it or snooze it to be reminded again later.

Finally, Clockenstein provides interfaces for desktop environments to interact with it, and even to replace its notification agent. The Cinnamon clock applet is fully compatible with these interfaces, so just like in the past, you’ll see your calendar events directly from the panel.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Gold Sponsors: Silver Sponsors:

Bronze Sponsors:

Donations in July:

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Well, that’s a photo from last night’s community dinner, but now the second day talks are beginning!

As with yesterday, we will be live-streaming most sessions on the schedule (in track rooms 1 and 2) and making recordings of all. Find out more by following our communication channels, where we’ll post the streaming links as we go live:

• Announcements channel (Telegram)
• Chat group (Telegram)
• Chat group (IRC, bridged to Telegram)

Here’s LibreOffice’s Engineering Steering Committee having their session:

We’re happy to announce the release of GIMP 3.2.6! This stable release contains several months worth of patches, bug fixes, security updates, and more from new and longtime contributors.

Special thanks to Bruno Lopes, who has taken charge of backporting fixes from our development branch to the 3.2 stable branch.

This news posts provides an overview of the changes since GIMP 3.2.4. For a more detailed review, check out the NEWS changelog.

General Highlights and UX Improvements⁠

A number of the fixes we first mentioned in our last development update were backported to GIMP 3.2.6.

Cheesequake has added code so you can use Cut on a layer group. This will allow you to cut the same section of all layers in the group, provided they are rasterized and not locked. Jehan made further improvements to this code.

The Sample Merged option for the Color Picker tool should now include any filters applied to a single layer when selecting colors. This was originally ignored due to an older optimization used for single layer images.

Balooii made many improvements to boost performance when loading a large number of fonts. While some lag remains and will likely require us to update to GTK4, the initial GIMP start-up, typing in the text tool, and closing font lists should be much faster!

Ondřej Míchal and Jehan have begun making changes to GIMP’s codebase to support an eventual GTK4 port. This includes swapping out the deprecated gtk_widget_show () functions with gtk_widget_set_visible (), replacing direct access to GdkEvent types with getter functions, replacing GDK_WA_CURSOR flags for explicit gdk_window_set_cursor () calls, and more. Even though we are not yet planning a GTK4 port, it doesn’t hurt to start preparing for it!

New contributor Ryan McDonald and Idriss Fekir have fixed an issue where the end of a line might be hidden on the left/right side when the text layout is set to “fixed”. When loading older XCFs, the problem will still be visible, but any changes to the text layer will update it to the correct view.

Kaushik B. has fixed an issue with the Heal Tool where you might get dark smudges if you move outside the bounds of a layer that’s smaller than the image canvas.

New contributor Manu Cornet and Jehan fixed a crash that could happen in certain circumstances when pressing keys too quickly after releasing the spacebar when panning.

Brandon Henderson reduced the sensitivity of the pan gestures when using the touchpad on macOS. This should make it easier to make fine-grain adjustments while editing an image on that platform!

Richard Gitschlag has adjusted the Text Tool so that you can still select the text to edit even if it has a layer mask that partially covers it.

Jacob Boerema resolved a bug in our metadata code that prevented GIMP from loading the Licensor metadata for an image.

Alx Sa added a maximum width of tooltips, preventing options with long descriptions from filling the entire screen.

Rodrigo Lledó Milanca updated our information on the ART Camera RAW plug-ins.

Several bugs related to rasterized vector layers have been resolved. Thanks to BobsDaughter, teapot, and Richard Gitschlag for their testing and feedback!

New Rotation Stylus Dynamics Input⁠

Jehan recently implemented a new dynamic input for painting - Rotation (also known as Barrel Rotation). This feature is prominently used in the original Wacom Art Pen and newer Wacom Art Pen 2 pens, and allows GIMP to react to how you have rotated the brush in your hand as you draw.

You can adjust this value for custom brushes in the Dynamics editor. The MyPaint Brush tool is integrated with this feature as well, so it will automatically pass the rotation on as you paint if your stylus supports it.

OS and Platform Specific Improvements⁠

GIMP uses GTK3, a cross-platform library for GUIs, to display its windows, widgets, and more. While it does a very good job of this, GIMP requires a lot of very complex interactions, and sometimes this can expose bugs that are only visible on certain platforms.

Bruno Lopes has been hard at work making a staggering number of platform-specific improvements to make GIMP work better. These include (but are not limited to):

• Using “Server-side Decorations” for dialogs on KDE instead of GNOME-style “Client-side Decorations”. (In other words, the buttons appear at the bottom of the dialog instead of the header bar).

• Secondary “pop-up” windows such as the resource selection and metadata editor dialogs should now appear in front of the first dialogue on Windows and macOS.

• The System theme now uses your system’s defined accent colors on Windows and macOS.

• Many improvements to proper focus setting on Windows and macOS.

• Improvements to multi-window mode operations on Windows and macOS.

• More system theme leaks caught on KDE Breeze system themes. This should help with graphical glitches in the UI.

• We now depend on winflexbison on Windows for building the Image Map plugin. This fixes an issue where Windows users couldn’t reopen their image maps, even when created with GIMP.

• Send to Email now works on MS Windows too using MAPI (works with Thunderbird and Outlook Classic).

• Windows users can now use “Open With” on multiple files on start, without creating multiple instances of GIMP. This is consistent with how Linux and other platforms operate.

Because these improvements are wide-ranging, it is possible that we missed some interactions during testing that could cause a regression. If you notice any problems in GIMP 3.2.6, please let us know!

New macOS Package⁠

Starting with GIMP 3.2.6, the .dmg package is now created at the same time as the Linux and Windows packages. This has not been possible for many years!

We used to create binaries for macOS on a separate GitLab repository, which was mirrored to another repository on GitHub, which was connected to a proprietary CI service (CircleCI) which then was connected to a MacStadium runner. All of that with dozens and dozens of additional patches, scripts etc! As you can see, this was extremely complicated, but it was the only way to ship macOS binaries back then.

Thanks to your donations, we were able to sponsor a MacBook Pro M5 for Bruno Lopes, who has been working since December 19, 2025 to fix that situation. As a result, GIMP can now be easily built on macOS with both MacPorts and Homebrew packages.

The macOS version of GIMP is now much more integrated with system-specific features, similar to the Linux and Windows version. A few examples:

• Titlebars on macOS now follow the dark/light mode settings of the current theme.

• Scrollbars now follow the macOS preference for whether they should be always visible or not.

• The more standard ~/Library/Caches/ location is used for storing caches of GIMP resources, fixing a bug of brushes directory not being created on macOS.

• GIMP’s number input buttons now respond to Cmd on macOS, like they do to Ctrl on other platforms. Some standard Mac shortcuts like, Ctrl + F2, Cmd + Shift + //Cmd + Ctrl + Space and Cmd + ` work as well.

• Meta and Hyper modifiers now work.

• Incorrect offsets when drag-n-dropping colors and layers/channels/paths have been fixed.

• Filters now accept negative values regardless of your system language settings.

• Plug-ins are treated as children of the main GIMP application, so they do not appear in the dock anymore.

• GIMP custom cursors are now properly set for all tools (previously, they were being overwritten by the macOS arrow).

• “GIMP”, “Windows” and “Help” menus now match the standard macOS menus with proper localization.

• Dialogs that shouldn’t be minimized (such as the search actions dialog shown with /) no longer show a minimize button on macOS.

• Remote files can be opened thanks to using the native macOS API, since GIO does not support HTTPS on this platform.

• Dashboard Backtraces are now supported using libunwind from libSystem.

In the process of implementing all these improvements, the separate macOS “developer package” was dropped. It was created due to the limitations of the previous macOS build infrastructure and became unnecessary now that it is way easier to build GIMP on macOS.

Plug-in and script developers should use the new GIMP SDK instead, or build GIMP directly.

Again, this is a brand new package. So, if you notice any problems in GIMP 3.2.6, please let us know!

Security updates⁠

GIMP has added support for importing many different file formats over the years. In recent years, security detection tools have improved and found more and more potential exploits in open source software. Jacob Boerema and Alx Sa have been busy testing and patching these.

For reference, the following Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) have been patched in this release:

CVE-2026-18301, CVE-2026-18304, CVE-2026-18302, CVE-2026-18303, CVE-2026-18305, CVE-2026-18306, CVE-2026-18307, CVE-2026-18308, CVE-2026-18309, CVE-2026-62438, CVE-2026-62439, ZDI-CAN-29400, CVE-2026-59087, CVE-2026-59088, CVE-2026-59089, CVE-2026-66757, CVE-2026-59090, CVE-2026-59091, CVE-2026-66758, CVE-2026-66759, CVE-2026-78465, CVE-2026-78475, CVE-2026-79902, CVE-2026-80101, CVE-2026-82324, CVE-2026-82328, CVE-2026-82330, CVE-2026-82343

We want to thank Jace, Brent Hull, Tristan Madani, Florent Saudel, bb1abu, Yukihiro Nakamura, Securin Disclose, and Zero Day Initiative for their security reports and suggestions. We also want to thank Michael Catanzaro for his help in organzing these reports and requesting CVEs for them.

For Plug-in/Script Authors and Builders⁠

Our GdkPixbuf dependency minimum version has been updated to 2.32.0 due to an issue with Glycin printing a bunch of unnecessary messages on start-up related to a deprecated to-pixdata function.

PDB commands now only show error/warning messages when run in interactive mode. For non-interactive modes, you won’t see anything printed in the console on PDB function failure. Instead, you can check the return values of the function and provide any messages you want to users.

Jehan improved our method for checking if a plug-in has been updated since the last time you opened GIMP. Now we check creation time (ctime) instead of just modified time (mtime) since it might be always 0 on certain packages like flatpak. This should mean that changes you make during development are more likely to be loaded if you’re testing on flatpak.

Kamil Burda fixed documentation for integer and double types in the Procedure Browser.

Pranav P corrected a build issue that caused a freeze on s390x systems.

GIMP SDK⁠

You can now build C plug-ins and GEGL filters from all the official packages we distribute by using the gimptool commandline tool. That is because we now ship all required headers and libraries for compiling (in total, less than 20MB).

Before now, this was possible only on flatpak and Snap. So, Bruno Lopes extended it to the AppImage, Windows and macOS packages. We call this new feature the “GIMP SDK”.

Take a look at the build instructions if you are interested.

Around GIMP⁠

GIMP 3.2 Help Manual Updates⁠

Jacob Boerema, maintainer of the GIMP help manual repo, has released an updated version that contains all the changes brought in GIMP 3.2. It is available online, or you can download it if you want to keep a local copy.

Historical News⁠

Balooii has been working to restored older news posts that have been lost to the ages. You can now see almost all news posts from 2004 to 2008 on the main site now - just navigate back to that point in time in the archive.

GEGL and babl⁠

GIMP 3.2.6 also shares a release with new versions of GEGL and babl by maintainer Øyvind Kolås!

babl 0.1.128 includes several fixes for building on macOS, initial WebAssembly support, and better checks at runtime for avx512 - all by Bruno Lopes.

GEGL 0.4.72 updates its OpenCL support to version 3.0. Ondřej Míchal worked on important stability fixes for the OpenCL code (though such code path is still disabled by default in GIMP). Jacob Boerema made several fixes to the RGBE file format import and export functions. Aruius made the GeglColor comparison functions public, for future use in better comparing comparing colors in GIMP and other software. Tal Regev added support for building GEGL using only MSVC, and Bruno Lopes added support for WebAssembly as well. Luigino Camastra added more security checks to prevent potential overflows.

More details can be found in the GEGL NEWS document!

Release Stats⁠

Since GIMP 3.2.4, in the main GIMP repository:

• 179 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 104 merge requests were merged.
• 871 commits were pushed.
• 21 translations were updated: Belarusian, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (China), Dutch, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovenian, Swedish, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

58 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.6 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

• 22 developers to core code: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jehan, Ondřej Míchal, balooii balooii, Richard Gitschlag, Michael Natterer, programmer-ceds, Ahmed E. Yassin, Andreas Vukman, Estecka, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, Manu Cornet, Petr Vorel, Ryan McDonald, balooii, cheesequake, kaushik_B, screem02, v4vansh, woot000.
• 14 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Dimitriy Ryazantcev, lloyd konneker, balooii balooii, Frank Teklote, Harsh Verma, Michal Vašut, Mike Gorse, Richard Allen, Rodhos.
• 23 translators: Dick Groskamp, luming zh, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Ekaterine Papava, Rodrigo Lledó, Aefgh Threenine, Anders Jonsson, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Emin Tufan Çetin, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Jose Riha, Марко Костић, Rafael Coelho Costa, Trần Ngọc Quân, Vasil Pupkin, Balázs Úr, Carsten Drewes, Juliano de Souza Camargo, Kjartan Maraas, Sabri Ünal, Yaron Shahrabani.
• 3 theme designers: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal.
• 9 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jacob Boerema, Petr Vorel, Harsh Verma, Lukas Oberhuber, Ondřej Míchal, balooii balooii, lloyd konneker.
• 3 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Aryeom.
• The gimp-data submodule had 16 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson, Denis Rangelov, Lukas Oberhuber, balooii balooii.
• 4 image creators: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Anders Jonsson, Lukas Oberhuber.
• 1 icon designers: Denis Rangelov.
• 1 cursor designers: balooii balooii.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• Our UX tracker had 3 reports closed as FIXED.
• babl 0.1.128 is made of 70 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Øyvind Kolås, Jehan.
• GEGL 0.4.72 is made of 234 commits by 28 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal, Øyvind Kolås, luming zh, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Tal Regev, WarisMaqbool, Aefgh Threenine, Anders Jonsson, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Dick Groskamp, Ekaterine Papava, Sabri Ünal, aruius, Alan Mortensen, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Chao-Hsiung Liao, DiGro, Marco Ciampa, Rodrigo Lledó, Saikeo Kavhanxay, Thomas Manni, YOSHIDA Shigeto, Марко Костић.
• ctx had 150 commits since 3.2.4 release by 3 contributors: Øyvind Kolås, Bruno Lopes, Tal Regev.
• The gimp-test-images (unit testing repository) repository had 5 commits by 1 contributors: Jacob Boerema.
• The flatpak release had 35 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Erick555, Jehan.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 182 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, balooii balooii, balooii, Liam Quin, Allan Day.
• Our developer website had 110 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, aruius, Ondřej Míchal.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 276 commits by 20 contributors: Jacob Boerema, Dick Groskamp, DiGro, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Marco Ciampa, Anders Jonsson, Yuri Chornoivan, Марко Костић, Richard Gitschlag, Alx Sa, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Christian Kirbach, Mateusz Jastrząb, YOSHIDA Shigeto, Andre Klapper, Balázs Úr, Chas Belov, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Rodrigo Lledó, Víttor Paulo Vieira da Costa.

Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix!

*Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through git scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or m

Downloading GIMP 3.2.6⁠

You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org):

• Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Linux Snaps for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Universal Windows installer for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• macOS DMG packages for Intel/x86 and Apple/ARM hardware (64-bit)

Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc).

What’s Next⁠

Work these days has mainly and already shifted to the development series which will eventually lead to GIMP 3.4 versions. For anyone who missed it, the Development Update, August 2026 news is interesting on this aspect. In the meantime, we will obviously still continue backporting bug fixes on the 3.2 series, of which GIMP 3.2.6 is a part of.

This new version should widely improve stability, and in particular it looks like macOS users should particularly appreciate it (thank Bruno for that)! We are also extremely thankful to the new skilled contributors the project has been getting. Don’t forget that, as long as you don’t use genAI in your toolset, everyone is very welcome to participate! 🤗

Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!

🐛 Bug Fixes & Minor Changes

• Moved Bergamot runtime to a verified opt-in download (#1213) by @JaredTweed in #1213

Yes, the LibreOffice Conference 2026 has started in Pordenone, northern Italy. If you’re attending in-person, we look forward to seeing you!

If you want to attend remotely, we will be live-streaming most sessions on the schedule (in track rooms 1 and 2) and making recordings of all. Find out more by following our communication channels, where we’ll post the streaming links as we go live:

• Announcements channel (Telegram)
• Chat group (Telegram)
• Chat group (IRC, bridged to Telegram)

Enjoy the conference, and a big thanks to the organisers for making it happen

• Milestone

This is a security-oriented major release with several important security patches, so users are encouraged to update without delay.

From this release, we are also making it clear that our rolling-release channel (edge) is recommended for faster security patches.

Breaking change 💥:

• Disallow access to local networks such as 127.0.0.1 by default, for security reasons

Feature highlights✨:

• Filter global view feed list by state and search
• New option to hide badges showing number of unread articles (Phantom Obligation)
• Refresh only feeds in the current view
• Offer to add a prefix when re-sharing user labels

Bug fixes highlights 🐛:

• Several security attack scenarios patched
• Fix lost elements while parsing search query
• Fix “mark as read older than…” widening the active search
• Fix saving user queries
• Fix SQL errors breaking some regex searches with MySQL / MariaDB

This release has been made by @Alkarex, @andris155, @ColonelMoutarde, @Frenzie, @IEEE-754, @Inverle, @math-GH, @nykula, @polybjorn, @Stunkymonkey and newcomers @0xdeadrelay, @AdamKorcz, @aligundogar, @bossaarebecca-alt, @Cactys12, @chrislongros, @Divinelink, @Elgeryy1, @featurecreep-cron, @Fripix, @fzlzjerry, @georatas, @gshimo, @iatman ,@ihsanarifr, @jamalkamaladdin, @JamBalaya56562, @jbrayton, @jeremy-code, @juherr, @kobihikri, @LeeXiaolan, @masskrdjn, @mohammadlashkari, @nathanpixodeo, @Otolock, @payaci, @salvador-castro, @SamCyber001, @satyvm, @senti-man, @simitana, @ThomasVermeer, @Totara-thib, @TowyTowy, @utkutibet, @XiaoSong1223

Full changelog:

• Security
  • 💥 Disallow access to local networks such as 127.0.0.1 by default, for security reasons (breaking change) #8400,
    #9195
    • Selected local networks can be allowed under System configuration or using the INTERNAL_HOST_ALLOWLIST environment variable
    • Passing * allows all networks like before (unsafe)
  • Improve SSRF mitigations by restricting CURLOPT_PROXY #8950
  • Fix auth CSRFs (login and register actions) #9171
  • Log invalid challenge and ignore JSON error during login #9278
  • Disallow fetching of non remote URI #9215
  • Only allow HTTP/HTTPS schemes for enclosure and thumbnail URLs #9272
  • Fix access control in rss and opml actions #8912
  • Refactor to use CSRF field directly instead of borrowing it from a form #9169, #9205
  • Cleaner limit anonymous mode to default user #9235
  • Fix HTML ingestions in templates #9146, #9170
  • Fix bad header filtering bypass #8964
  • Sanitize all fields during JSON import #9168
  • Gate greader (JSON) user query share format behind Share by OPML #9248
  • Public OPML should not contain cURL parameters #9070
  • Ignore security-relevant OPML attributes for dynamic OPML sources #9276
  • Strip feed URL credentials from anonymous user query output #9246
  • Set limits for regex during search #8913
  • Fix path disclosure in cache error message #9206
  • Limit the length and parentheses nesting depth of a search query #9277
  • Use timing-safe comparison for tokens #8945
  • Use hash_equals() for GReader API token comparison #9183
  • Mailer: allow disabling SMTPAutoTLS via config #9026
  • Warn during install if document root does not point to ./p/ #9010
  • Stop the unread-count poller after the session ends #9065
  • Add remote IP address to warning on form login #8942
  • Pin the GitHub actions using SHA #9200
  • Harden cache and SimplePie cache deserialization #9273
• SimplePie
  • Security: Disallow javascript: URI scheme (protocol) #8263
  • Fix wrong player parent logic leading to invalid type #8893, simplepie#978
  • Consistently enable XML_OPTION_PARSE_HUGE #8894, simplepie#977
  • Fix null warning in IRI for PHP 8.5+ #8918, simplepie#979
  • Fix sanitizer whitelist stripping order #9066
  • Show only one representation per media:group #9009
  • Bump upstream SimplePie #8947
• Features
  • Filter global view feed list by state and search #9132
    • Use global view when searching from subscription page #9144
  • New option to hide badges showing number of unread articles (Phantom Obligation) #8844
  • Refresh only feeds in the current view #9060
  • Offer to add a prefix when resharing user labels #9236
  • Add log search to the logs page #9059
  • Add configurable log_level system setting #9185
  • New option to keep or not the custom sort order when navigating between categories and feeds #8969
  • New per-feed option to show or hide enclosures (attachments) #9015
  • Detect JSON feeds from URLs containing json #9058
    • Also when subscribing via the API #9167
  • Order categories during OPML import/export according to position #9203
  • OPML: include each feed’s refresh interval (TTL) in export/import #8982
  • Log failed CSS content retrieval (Web scraping) #9077
  • Allow providing a category when adding a feed by bookmarklet #9047
  • Add LinkAce sharing service #9024
  • Add Nextcloud Bookmarks sharing service #9032
• Bug fixing
  • Fix lost elements while parsing search query #8884
  • Fix “mark as read older than…” widening the active search #9173
  • Fix saving user queries #9190
  • Fix SQL errors breaking some regex searches with MySQL / MariaDB #9036
  • Fix marking filtered label articles as read in SQLite and PostgreSQL #9264
  • Fix tagging an already-tagged entry on PostgreSQL raising a SQL error instead of being a no-op #9136
  • PostgreSQL: make committing new entries resilient to duplicate keys #9231
  • Preserve negative timezone offsets in date intervals #9071
  • Fix feed dropdown bugs due to hash desync #8949
  • Fix slider not reinitializing after form submit #8973
  • Minz: Skip loading duplicated JS/CSS assets #9000
  • Respect simplepie_syslog_enabled for the uses cache logs #8986
  • Fix statistics repartition averages #8996
  • Fix article hover date visibility #8997
  • Keep search and state filters when marking articles as read #9007
  • Fix --db-prefix silently drops following CLI flags #9042
  • Remove stale dynamic favicon links #9127
  • Fix desync between favicon and title unread counters #9262
  • Fix outdated username length hint on registration and install forms #9013
  • Redirect away from wrong URL paths #9075
  • Fix auto-share shortcut on first use #9072
  • Exclude hidden feeds from global view counts #9152
  • Fix only the last <media:credit> being written to the RSS output #9174
• CLI
  • New cli/reconfigure-user.php to read/write per-user config attributes #8873
  • Report new articles count per feed in app/actualize_script.php output #8948
  • Output a diagnostic when the cli/health.php check fails #8980
• API
  • Add a warning message to the API password section and a log warning when a client uses GET instead of recommended POST #8845
  • Fever API: log the client IP address on authentication failure #8981
  • WebSub: ignore HTTP/HTTPS scheme difference in Self URL comparison #9005
• Deployment
  • Docker alternative image updated to Alpine 3.24 with PHP 8.5.7 and Apache 2.4.67 #8916
  • Start supporting PHP 8.6+
    • Docker dev :newest with PHP 8.6 #9155
  • Docker: attach provenance and SBOM attestations to the published image #9150
  • Apache use only CONN_REMOTE_ADDR in logs when mod_remoteip is available, for compatibility with LiteSpeed Web Server #8890
  • Fix .dockerignore being ignored during build in CI #9001
  • New ENABLE_ACCESS_LOG environment variable to disable access logs #9191
  • Check GMP during 32-bit installation #9046
  • Improve actualize mutex to allow multiple instances #9045
  • OIDC: redirect to a default URL on expired auth state instead of 400 #9143
• UI
  • Always jump article to top when header is offscreen, also when Stick the article to the top when opened is disabled #8870
  • Move article header/footer options (feed title, authors and date, icons position, tags) from Reading to Display configuration #9139
  • Move disable button before remove button in user management #8944
  • Keep scroll position of slider after form submit #8974
  • Group export feeds by category #9079, #9154
  • Sort feed names with locale-aware collation #8985
  • Sort labels with locale-aware collation #9023
  • Format unread counter in title on page load #9263
  • Display slider after submit for all buttons in feed update UI #8999
  • Improve aside keyboard navigation #9202
  • Allows usage of Ctrl/Shift keys with the open website shortcut #9186
  • Fix padding for .nav_menu in Alternative-Dark, Flat, and Nord themes #8901
  • Fix typo in alert error border color variable #9266
  • Use JavaScript Event() constructor instead of deprecated initEvent() #9035
  • Use :user-invalid instead of :invalid for CSS form field styling #9025
  • Remove unused simple layout #8998
  • Various UI and style improvements: #8823, #8824,
    #9140, #9145
• Extensions
  • Minor Minz_Extension typing #8952
  • Improve extension list fetch diagnostics #9055
  • Fix a PHP warning in Serve action #9267
  • Fix extension settings cancel action #9053
  • Fix sharing menu conflicts with extensions #9074
  • Add read status hook for entries #8995
  • Dispatch a new JavaScript event freshrss:entryStateChange when an entry finishes being marked read/unread #9031
  • Redirect after saving user CSS/JS so changes apply immediately #9006
• I18n
  • New plural system #8988
    • Pluralize the new articles count message
  • Prefer OS-bundled Japanese fonts when UI language is Japanese #9002
  • Add Azerbaijani #9269
  • Add Lithuanian #9201, #9213
  • Improve Brazilian Portuguese #9240, #9242
  • Improve German #9149
  • Improve Greek #8977, #9038
  • Improve Hungarian #8879
  • Improve Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) #9220
  • Improve Italian #8880
  • Improve Japanese #9064
  • Improve Persian #8923
  • Improve Spanish #8878, #9245
  • Improve Traditional Chinese #9037, #9069, #9223
  • Improve Turkish #8966, #8971, #8970,
    #8989
  • Improve Ukrainian #8871
  • Refactor user query translation keys #9049
• Misc.
  • Update to PHPMailer 7.1.1 #8907
  • Improve PHP code #8906, #9156
  • Fix PHPStan 2.2.2 in CLI #8911
  • Migrate markdownlint-cli to markdownlint-cli2 #8987
  • Update dev dependencies #8904, #8905, #8926,
    #8939, #8940, #8963,
    #8961, #8959, #8958,
    #8962, #8960, #9148,
    #9162, #9165, #9158,
    #9159, #9176, #9178,
    #9179, #9219, #9253,
    #9254, #9255, #9257

This year’s conference starts in two days, in Pordenone, northern Italy – and we’re getting ready. It’s not too late to register and join us!

The Document Foundation is the non-profit organisation that coordinates the LibreOffice community. Anyone who contributes to the project can apply to become a member of the foundation, and join the over 200 existing members. We’ve also partnered with TUXEDO, a laptop vendor based in Germany that offers Linux-powered machines, to offer TDF members a 3% discount. The laptops include LibreOffice, of course, and have the option of a special LibreOffice key.

Annika Litzel from TUXEDO says:

We’re very excited to continue our collaboration with The Document Foundation and LibreOffice! As a manufacturer that has always been committed to Linux and Open Source, supporting projects and communities that help build a free and independent digital ecosystem is especially important to us. With this continued partnership, we want to provide a direct benefit to TDF members while strengthening our shared vision: powerful hardware, Linux, and free software should work seamlessly together – without unnecessary dependencies and with a strong focus on privacy and digital sovereignty. A big thank you to The Document Foundation for their continued trust and for this great collaboration!

Find out more about TUXEDO here, and apply to become a member of TDF on this page.

Tell us what you’re doing in the LibreOffice project, and other free and open source (FOSS) projects!

I’m a member of the Brazilian documentation team, officially since 2017. I spent most of that time working on translation and localisation, but lately I’ve been working more on web design, like the Bookshelf project and the online help update. I’d also worked on translation and localisation in other projects before, like the XOOPS CMS and the Fedora project, where I started as an ambassador back in 2008.

What are your professional activities and how do they relate to FOSS?

I’m a federal public servant in Brazil, and I’ve taken part in some initiatives to use free software in government, but I don’t make decisions at that level, so there’s little I can do to push the adoption of free software where I work. My personal use and choice of tools leans toward free software whenever there’s a choice, but there aren’t many choices.

What have you contributed recently in the LibreOffice project?

The online help update has been getting some attention, and I’ve been able to contribute to modernising it and using standards that are more accessible and responsive, along with a more modern look that has more appeal. We have a weekly meeting in the Brazilian community where we keep up with the team’s efforts, propose new ideas, and adopt workflows that help the project.

What is contributing like (what bits are easy or hard, with the tools and processes in the project)?

One thing that took me a while was getting past the initial barrier to contributing bug reports or submitting code via Git — every organisation has its own way of doing things, and some have more hurdles than others. Once you get past that initial barrier, things get a lot easier.

How do you interact with other members of the LibreOffice community (especially the Brazilian one)?

Our weekly meeting helps a lot with that — we talk regularly, and that goes a long way toward solving problems and bringing members closer together. We’ve had some in-person meetings at events like the conference held in Brasília in 2022 and some hackathons, and we plan to have more of these gatherings, which tend to be quite productive and enjoyable too.

What is your impression of LibreOffice as a product? Do you see it used in Brazil, in areas of the public and private sectors?

Personally, I’ve been using the suite since it was called StarOffice, when it was pretty much the only really useful office suite for Linux at the turn of the millennium. Then came OpenOffice, which in Brazil ended up being named BrOffice, and finally LibreOffice.

My honest opinion is that it’s the most complete office suite available on the market, and I’m glad it’s an open source tool, which is my preference for any software. These days I use office suites a lot less because of the tasks I usually do on the computer — it’s rarely necessary — but I still keep up-to-date, even through translating the help, which shows new features in LibreOffice to anyone who pays attention.

Join the LibreOffice community here!

We’re gearing up for the LibreOffice Conference 2026 next week in Pordenone, northern Italy – but there are more events in the pipeline too.

At the Open Source Conference Luxembourg 2026, which takes place on October 7, there will be two talks from Florian Effenberger, Executive Director at The Document Foundation, around the topics of LibreOffice:

• Why free software and digital sovereignty are made for one another
• The Cyber Resilience Act and Open Source: where do we stand? LibreOffice’s conformity journey as a working example

Keep an eye on the conference website for more details and videos of the talks.

Berlin, 4 September 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.6, the sixth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch. Building on the major feature release published on February 4, 2026, this update delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements contributed by a global community of developers and QA engineers.

LibreOffice 26.2.6 is available for immediate download at libreoffice.org/download for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

List of fixes in RC1: Releases/26.2.6/RC1. List of fixes in RC2: Releases/26.2.6/RC2.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project with a donation at libreoffice.org/donate.

Q&A — LibreOffice 26.2.6

Q: What is LibreOffice 26.2.6?

LibreOffice 26.2.6 is the sixth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch, released by The Document Foundation on 4 September 2026. It delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements over the major feature release published on 4 February 2026.

Q: When was LibreOffice 26.2.6 released?

4 September 2026.

Q: Where can I download LibreOffice 26.2.6?

From https://www.libreoffice.org/download/, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Q: Which operating systems does LibreOffice 26.2.6 support?

Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Q: What is the next version of LibreOffice after 26.2.6?

The Document Foundation will announce LibreOffice 26.8.1 on 17 September 2026, and LibreOffice 26.2.7 on 29 October 2026.

Q: Where can I find the full list of fixes in LibreOffice 26.2.6?

RC1: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.6/RC1 — RC2: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.6/RC2

Q: Who develops LibreOffice 26.2.6?

A global community of volunteer and professional developers and QA engineers, coordinated by The Document Foundation, the Berlin-based non-profit behind LibreOffice.

Q: How much does LibreOffice 26.2.6 cost?

Nothing — LibreOffice is free and open source software. Users and advocates can support the project with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

One of the comments on the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 was a simple question: “So, no AI is now a feature?”

LibreOffice does not reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people – in schools, hospitals, public bodies, law firms and thousands of other organisations – will not add a feature to its default configuration until that feature can be delivered under the conditions defined by the project in accordance with its principles.

User-controlled execution. The user must be able to choose where inference takes place: on the local computer, on an infrastructure directly controlled by the user, or on a service chosen independently by the user. A default setting that silently redirects to a single provider is not a choice.

No content may leave the computer without authorisation. The content of documents is a user’s asset and, in many implementations, is also legally protected material: medical records, case files, tender documents and student data. Transmission must be the result of a user’s decision and not behaviour carried out in the background by the application.

No telemetry of any kind. LibreOffice does not collect usage data, and this must also apply to AI features.

No dependence on a single provider. An integration that only works with a single company’s API is a lock-in mechanism, regardless of how it is described in the release notes. Interfaces should be open and implementable by multiple backends.

No compromises on format. Generated content must be in ODF format, just like any other content, and must retain its structure, styles and semantics. An assistant that generates documents in a proprietary format perpetuates content lock-in.

Entirely optional. It must be installable, removable, and absent from the user interface for those who do not wish to use it, including administrators deploying the software across thousands of workstations who, due to company policy, do not authorise its use.

Where we stand today

In light of this list, there is no integration that meets all the requirements and that could be deployed, enabled by default, and supported throughout the entire lifecycle of a release. This is an assessment of the current state of the technology and the solutions based on it, and not a judgement on the value of the sector.

In the meantime, users who wish to use AI features can install one of the available extensions, which can be found either on the LibreOffice extensions website or distributed independently. Most connect to a locally running model via Ollama, LM Studio or another OpenAI-compatible endpoint, which means the document never leaves the computer.

These are third-party extensions at various stages of maturity, developed and maintained by their respective authors rather than by The Document Foundation. Users and administrators should assess them as they would any third-party component, checking whether a cloud endpoint is configured and what the provider does with the data it receives. The extension mechanism offers AI functionality to those who want it, without any consequences for all other users.

Why our motivations are different

The reason our position differs from that of the dominant suites has almost nothing to do with the technology.

For a company that sells subscriptions, an AI assistant justifies a price increase and strengthens the case for keeping all documents within its own infrastructure. The functionality and the business model reinforce each other, so integration is not only attractive but almost mandatory.

The Document Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation. There are no subscription tiers to protect, no upsells, no data to monetise. This does not make us wiser than others, but it means we can take the time needed to decide whether something is genuinely useful for our users, as we are not driven by quarterly results.

What lies ahead

The criteria we have listed do not amount to a definitive rejection. The AI sector is evolving rapidly; on-premises inference is becoming manageable on standard hardware; and open models are improving much faster than most of us had anticipated. Should an approach emerge that meets all the conditions, we will evaluate it very carefully.

Until then, there will be no AI of any kind in the default installation; extensions will be available for those who wish to integrate AI features, and we will closely monitor where the technology is actually heading.

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 26.8, our brand new major update. It’s full of new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some statistics…

1,031,162 downloads

This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release! These are just stats from our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.

50,061 views, shares and likes on social media

Combining our Mastodon, Bluesky, X/Twitter (not used so much now) and Facebook posts about the announcement, and all the likes, shares, views and comments, we get over 50,000. Thanks to everyone who spread the word on social media!

20,918 video views

Our “LibreOffice 26.8 – New Features” video (shown below), has subtitle translations in 32 languages, thanks to our worldwide community, who localised the video on this page. (The video is also available on PeerTube.)

Many thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

• We released LibreOffice 26.8, our latest major update, with tabbed UI improvements, professional typography, deeper support for the world’s writing systems, and no built-in artificial intelligence.

• To accompany the release, we made a video showcasing some of the user-facing new features – with subtitle translations in 25 languages, thanks to our worldwide community! (The video is also available on PeerTube.)

• Meanwhile, the Austrian Military (Bundesheer) has moved 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice – and we talked to the people behind the migration, to find out how they did it. Check out part 1 and part 2 of the interview.

• Then we talked to Karl-Heinz Gruner from the German-speaking LibreOffice community about his activities in the project.

• Extensions add extra features to LibreOffice, and we talked to Bora Yarkın about a new one which lets you control a LibreOffice Impress presentation from your phone or any other device with a modern web browser.

• In the middle of August, the schedule for the LibreOffice Conference 2026 went online. If you can make it, we look forward to seeing you there

• Then we did another Community Member Monday interview, this time talking to Aleksi Kallio about his work on fixing bugs in LibreOffice.

• There’s a lot of talk about “Digital Sovereignty” – but what does that actually mean? One vital part is an open document platform – like ODF.

• LibreOffice is a worldwide project made up of hundreds of people: volunteers, developers at ecosystem companies, and the 18-person team at The Document Foundation (the non-profit entity that coordinates the project and community). What has the team been working on recently? Check this post to find out.

• LibreOffice has a few user interface options, and none are forced on the user. We explored this topic more in a post called There Is No “Best” Interface, Only the Right Fit.

• How is LibreOffice funded? The vast majority of funding comes in the form of donations – mostly from end-users, but also occasionally from companies and organisations that use LibreOffice.

• Finally, we wrapped up August with another Community Member Monday, talking to Rohan Singh about his macOS-related development work.

Like what we do? Support LibreOffice with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better! Also keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit and Facebook.

🚀 Features

• Added Bergamot local translation fallback (#1147) by @JaredTweed in #1147
• Add option to disable built-in audio player (#1192) by @spacecowboy in #1192
• Added setting to force single column feed (#1193) by @MB3hel in #1193
• Added ‘Apply to links’ toggle to blocklist feature (#1196) by @zork3000 in #1196

🐛 Bug Fixes & Minor Changes

• Update feed url if selfLink has a new address in the original feed (#1096) by @xn-7492 in #1096
• Reset TTS queue on article switch and resume same article only (#1203) by @atirna in #1203

🌐 Translations

• Updated French translation using Weblate by @Matth7878 in commit
• Updated Latvian translation using Weblate by @Coool in commit
• Updated Estonian translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Ukrainian translation using Weblate by @G-H-User in commit
• Updated Hungarian translation using Weblate by @summoner001 in commit
• Updated Czech translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Polish translation using Weblate by @Aga-C in commit
• Updated Chinese (Simplified Han script) translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Serbian translation using Weblate by @eevan78 in commit
• Updated German translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Danish translation using Weblate in commit
• Updated Italian translation using Weblate by @uovasbattute in commit
• Updated Tamil translation using Weblate by @TamilNeram in commit
• Updated Spanish translation using Weblate by @xuars in commit
• Updated Indonesian translation using Weblate by @arifpedia in commit
• Updated Turkish translation using Weblate in #1200

❤️ New Contributors

• @atirna made their first contribution in #1203
• @xuars made their first contribution
• @TamilNeram made their first contribution
• @uovasbattute made their first contribution
• @G-H-User made their first contribution
• @zork3000 made their first contribution in #1196
• @MB3hel made their first contribution in #1193

On August 26 we released LibreOffice 26.8. Here’s a video highlighting some of the user-facing new features and improvements, with subtitle translations in over 25 languages, thanks to our worldwide community! (Note: the video is also available on PeerTube.)

LibreOffice 26.8 is the first version to display a donation banner in the Launch Centre. This document explains the reasons behind this decision and provides information on The Document Foundation’s sustainability model.

All figures are taken from the financial statements of The Document Foundation Stiftung, based in Berlin, and have been published on the website for every year of the foundation’s existence since its registration.

TDF revenue in 2025

Total revenue amounted to approximately 2.2 million euros.

Of this, over 90 per cent comes from donations, and the remainder almost entirely from the sale of LibreOffice via Microsoft and Apple’s online stores, where the price is set to cover the costs of maintaining the applications on those platforms.

It is worth noting that the same versions available on Microsoft’s and Apple’s online stores can be downloaded freely – and therefore free of charge – from the LibreOffice website.

Over 90 per cent of donations come from private individuals, and less than 10 per cent from public bodies and companies. Therefore, although the suite is widely used by companies and public bodies, it is funded almost entirely by private individuals who contribute small sums according to their means.

How much did TDF spend in 2025

Total expenditure amounted to approximately 1.5 million euros.

Seventy-five per cent of this expenditure was allocated to staff salaries and social security contributions, as well as consultancy contracts. Today, the foundation employs 18 people, 11 of whom have contributed to software development or other related activities, such as quality control.

It is worth emphasising this proportion clearly. Three-quarters of the TDF’s expenditure goes on staff, and the largest share is accounted for by development work, community building and education on the themes of software freedom, open standards and digital sovereignty.

Donations are channelled into constructive activities, rather than administrative costs.

In the past, a significant proportion of development work was awarded to companies that submitted the best bid in response to a tender, but this strategy has changed, and it was decided to bring development expertise in-house so as to steer the software’s evolution and share knowledge with the community.

The surplus in 2025

The surplus is not left unused but is reinvested in the growth already underway: three developers were hired during 2026 and two more will be hired shortly. In addition, various marketing and community development projects are funded from the same source.

The foundation’s expenditure does not follow a uniform pattern relative to its income. The recruitment process takes months, and if income is received before new staff are hired, a surplus will arise that represents planned work rather than unspent money.

TDF also maintains reserves, with the aim of covering at least one year’s operating costs. This figure, of course, increases year on year.

For an organisation with a single predominant source of income, this represents a minimum target. Indeed, a foundation that employs 18 people and supports a community of thousands has obligations towards them that cannot be suspended if income from donations declines.

Why this banner, and why now?

TDF is in good financial health. However, when compared with similar projects, it is significantly underfunded.

Thunderbird, an open-source email client supported almost entirely by donations, received $10.3 million in 2024 – 19 per cent more than the previous year – from over 335,000 individual donors. The Wikimedia Foundation operates on an even larger scale.

LibreOffice has a user base comparable to or larger than that of Thunderbird and a more extensive source code, covering six applications, dozens of file formats and 120 languages, whilst generating revenue amounting to around one-fifth of Thunderbird’s.

The gap is significant because the market has changed. Most people compare LibreOffice with Microsoft 365, and this creates expectations regarding availability on the web, in the cloud and on mobile devices that a desktop-focused development effort is unable to meet.

TDF has published a roadmap for web, cloud and mobile development. Delivering this within a timeframe that keeps pace with market developments requires greater development capacity than current revenue can support.

The banner serves to partially bridge this gap. It appears in the Start Centre – the screen that appears when the suite is launched without any documents open – and is displayed periodically, for example at monthly intervals or following an update. The banner links to the donations page and does not appear anywhere else in the software.

What the banner is not

LibreOffice contains no adverts, does not collect telemetry data and does not require any account, subscription or activation. No features are reserved for paying users. The suite does not transmit documents to a remote service and does not require network access to function. LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative artificial intelligence features.

Maintaining each of these features incurs costs, as each represents a source of revenue that the foundation has chosen not to exploit.

Advertising-supported software is funded by attention; subscription-based software is funded by the ability to revoke access; and data-driven software is funded by surveillance. TDF has ruled out all three of these options, leaving only the possibility of donations.

The problem with companies

The imbalance between individual and corporate donations is a specific problem that the foundation would like to rectify.

Companies and public bodies deploy LibreOffice on a large scale — in some cases on tens of thousands of computers — and derive a direct commercial benefit from it. Under the terms of the Mozilla Public Licence v2, they have the right to do so, and no one intends to revoke this right.

Unfortunately, very few of these organisations contribute financially to the project. The result is that private individuals are, in effect, subsidising the infrastructure costs of organisations that have considerably greater resources than they do.

Organisations that rely on LibreOffice have at least three ways of supporting it. They can make a donation to The Document Foundation, or purchase an enterprise version from a company within the LibreOffice ecosystem that offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA), professional support and security updates for a period of between three and five years, or pay a company or an individual to develop specific features tailored to their needs.

All these methods support the software, but none is used on a scale that is even remotely comparable to what one might expect given the widespread adoption of the product.

In fact, during 2026, the average monthly number of LibreOffice downloads approached one million, and there were nearly 600 million visits to the website from which updates are downloaded. Based on these two figures, even a very conservative estimate puts the number of LibreOffice users worldwide at over 100 million.

Digital sovereignty is usually discussed in terms of where servers are located and which company holds the contract. Both matter less than the format in which documents are written.

A document is not a piece of paper

The habit of thinking of a digital document as a sheet of paper is understandable and wrong. A sheet of paper carries its own content. Anyone who can read the language can read the page, with no equipment, no permission and no intermediary. A digital document carries no content at all until software interprets it. The file is a set of instructions, and what appears on screen is the result of a program executing those instructions. Change the program and the result may change with it.

This is why documents produced in one application so often look wrong in another: bullet points shift, tables lose their proportions, headings render differently. The content is present. The document, strictly speaking, is not.

The format is the specification that tells software how to perform that interpretation. Whoever controls the format therefore controls what the document means, how faithfully it can be reproduced, and for how long.

What makes a format open

Openness is not a marketing description. It has established criteria, set out in instruments such as the Open Definition and the European Interoperability Framework, and used by public administrations to assess formats for procurement. Four conditions matter most.

The specification must be published in full and freely available. Nobody should need a licence, a fee or a patent settlement to implement it. The format must be usable by anyone for any purpose, without discrimination between users, applications or business models. And it must be governed by a body independent of any single vendor, so that future versions are decided in public rather than in a company’s product roadmap.

These conditions exist for a practical reason. They are what guarantees that a document written today can still be opened in thirty years by software nobody has yet written.

ODF meets these conditions

The Open Document Format was developed in the open under OASIS, the international standards consortium, and became an OASIS standard in 2005. It cleared its Draft International Standard ballot at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 in May 2006 with unanimous approval and was published as ISO/IEC 26300 that November. The specification is public, royalty-free, versioned, and maintained by a technical committee whose work is a matter of record. Version 1.4 was approved by OASIS in December 2025.

ODF is not the LibreOffice format. It is implemented by a range of applications from different suppliers, and any developer may implement it without asking anyone. LibreOffice uses it natively, which is a consequence of the format’s openness rather than a claim of ownership over it.

OOXML does not

OOXML, the format underlying DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files, carries an ISO number. It was granted one in 2008 through a fast-track procedure whose conduct is now part of the documented history of standards governance.

The number has not produced the effects a standard is meant to produce. The specification runs to several thousand pages, which discourages implementation. It exists in two conformance classes: a Strict variant, which other developers could reasonably support, and a Transitional variant, which preserves legacy behaviours and is what Microsoft Office writes by default. The variant in daily use by hundreds of millions of people is therefore the one that only its originator implements completely. The cleaner variant that competitors could support is largely unused, and has even disappeared from some versions.

A specification that a single implementation alone can satisfy is, in functional terms, a proprietary format with a standardisation certificate attached. This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of what the format does regardless of anyone’s intentions, and it is the reason the distinction is structural rather than moral.

Why this decision comes first

An organisation that adopts a European cloud provider, negotiates strong contractual protections and hosts everything within its own jurisdiction has achieved nothing for sovereignty if its documents remain in a format only one foreign supplier can read correctly. Server location, hosting jurisdiction and procurement clauses are all downstream of the format decision. An organisation that cannot open its own archives without a supplier’s permission is not sovereign over them, wherever those archives happen to be stored.

The exposure grows with time. An individual with a distorted layout has an inconvenience. A ministry holding two decades of legislative drafts, land registries and court records in a format it cannot independently interpret has delegated custody of the public record to a private company, and cannot withdraw that delegation without converting everything it owns.

Who has already acted

Germany’s Deutschland-Stack, the federal framework for sovereign public digital infrastructure, names ODF and PDF/UA as the mandated document formats, to the exclusion of proprietary alternatives. The IT Planning Council, the body through which the federal government and the Länder coordinate public administration information technology, has committed to ODF. NATO and the European Commission have mandated it.

The decision is not a European one. Taiwan adopted ODF as a national standard in 2009 and has required it as the government’s document format since January 2015, a policy its Ministry of Digital Affairs describes in terms of software equality, digital sovereignty and sustainable development. Brazil has required federal executive bodies to follow the e-PING interoperability framework, built on open standards, since 2005. Public administrations on almost every continent have taken comparable decisions over the past two decades.

What has changed recently is the reasoning. The case for moving away from proprietary office software was once made primarily as a cost saving. It is now made as the preservation of independence, meaning the ability of a public body to act without asking permission from a foreign supplier. Several of the migrations announced in the past year were presented in exactly those terms, with the cost argument set aside. At least one European defence organisation has stated that its decision was not about money at all.

The alternative to lock-in already exists, is mature, is an international standard, and is a legal requirement in several European jurisdictions.

Further reading

Start here

• What is Digital Sovereignty
• There is no digital sovereignty without ODF
• The characteristics of a truly open document standard format

Format comparison and lock-in

• ODF is the future, OOXML is the past
• Why ODF and not OOXML
• How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
• Document formats: a mystery to many
• The non-technical dependency layers: the Calendar and the Invoice

Policy and adoption

• Twenty years on, ODF is still the only open standard for office documents, and the only one governments can trust
• Germany’s sovereign digital stack mandates ODF
• Policy and digital sovereignty – TDF Annual Report 2025
• Euro-Office: sovereign in name only, or in reality too?

Technical reference

• What is the Open Document Format (ODF)?
• A technical dive into ODF
• Understanding ODF file types: .odt, .ods, .odp and beyond
• What’s new in ODF 1.3 and 1.4
• ODF v1.4 approved as an OASIS standard

Berlin, 26 August 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the availability of LibreOffice 26.8, the new major release of the free and open source office suite, for Windows, macOS and Linux. Development began in December 2025, and the release consolidates the work of 206 contributors, of whom 155 are volunteers.

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.

Writing systems

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.

Alignment semantics have been revised accordingly: new documents default to start alignment rather than left, and changing paragraph direction no longer mirrors explicitly left- or right-aligned paragraphs.

Math has gained named functions and operators for the N’Ko and Adlam scripts, used for the Manding languages of West Africa and for Fulani, together with left-pointing vectors and harpoons for right-to-left formulas. The CJK text grid option has been renamed to reflect what it actually does, namely enable the genkō yōshi manuscript grid. Font names recorded in languages other than the interface language are now resolved, so documents authored elsewhere display in the typefaces their authors chose.

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.

Typography

Writer introduces the Paragraph Composer, a text layout algorithm that balances word spacing across consecutive lines instead of optimising each line in isolation. The single-line, greedy approach used by word processors has been standard since the technology existed, and produces justified text that alternates between crowded and sparse lines wherever long words fall near a break.

OpenType font variations are now natively supported, allowing variable fonts to be used as designed, including axes that adjust letterform contrast and proportion to the size at which text is set.

Baseline grid alignment now works correctly for text inside frames, and the grid itself can be displayed while editing, with a configurable colour.

Document exchange

LibreOffice Chart provides basic round-trip support for the newer chart types that Microsoft Office writes into OOXML files: box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap and waterfall. These charts cannot yet be rendered or edited. LibreOffice displays a message identifying the unsupported type and preserves the underlying definition, so that a file opened and saved in LibreOffice returns to its originating application intact. Region map charts carry extensive geographic data that is not preserved; the chart type survives the round trip but little of its content does.

The distinction matters. A specification extended unilaterally by a single implementer is a moving target for every other implementer. Preserving what cannot yet be rendered is the discipline that keeps a document usable beyond the lifetime of the application that created it.

Calc improves the handling of line breaks in referenced cells in XLSX files, and form control elements in XLSX documents now appear in the Navigator.

Spreadsheets

Calc adds Calculated Fields to pivot tables. Data validity can now silently reject invalid entries, restoring behaviour available before version 24.2. Cell styles support relative font sizes. A Shuffle command randomises the order of cells in a range. The border toolbar button remembers and reapplies the most recently used style.

Presentations and drawings

Impress and Draw support multiple page sizes within a single document. Impress adds presentation sections for organising slides into named groups, displays custom slide names beside slide numbers in the panel, and can convert numbered lists to bulleted ones. Several embedded templates are now supplied in both 16:9 and 4:3 ratios, so that background artwork is no longer stretched when the ratio changes. In Draw, the functions of the mouse wheel can be swapped, making zoom the default action.

User interface

The Notebookbar now carries a distinct background colour for each application, so that Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw can be told apart at a glance. Its tabs have category labels and can be scrolled with the mouse wheel or touchpad. Changes to application theme colours no longer require a restart, and theme colours are reachable from the Notebookbar in Impress.

The list of styles is now consistent across the Notebookbar, the Formatting toolbar and the sidebar, and each entry is shown as a preview of the style itself. Style dialogues allow individual properties to be reset to those of the parent style. Paper sizes from A0 to B3 have been added to page settings. Custom dictionaries have gained a search filter, the Hyperlink dialogue can strip query strings from addresses, and resizable dialogues on Windows now have a maximise button. On macOS, the Emoji & Symbols, Dictation and AutoFill menu items are available.

Accessibility

Writer tables now report row and column index information as specified in ARIA, improving how screen readers convey table structure. The special character selector is fully navigable by keyboard.

Databases and automation

Base preserves SQL comments when a query is 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, and can instantiate UNO services through constructors rather than string identifiers. The ScriptForge libraries add a typed input dialogue, functional map, filter and reduce operations on Basic arrays, and a default named pipe that allows the same script to run unchanged inside LibreOffice or against it as a client.

Elsewhere in the suite

• Keyboard shortcuts can be assigned to an individual document, so a shortcut can invoke a style that exists only in one template.
• Writer opens very large documents containing images significantly faster.
• A Draft view hides headers, footers and margins for distraction-free work.
• The Quick Find sidebar searches through comments.
• Table styles in Writer and Calc can be edited, and their internal representation has been converted from a binary format to XML.
• Application theme colour changes no longer require a restart.
• Additional paper sizes from A0 to B3 are available in page settings.
• The style list is now consistent across the Notebookbar, the Formatting toolbar and the sidebar.
• Automated testing now uses VeraPDF to validate PDF output.

No artificial intelligence

LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative AI features. Documents are not transmitted to remote services for processing, and no component of the suite requires network access to function. This is a deliberate position. 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.

How LibreOffice is funded

LibreOffice 26.8 is the first release to display a donation banner in the Start Centre, the screen shown when the suite is launched without opening a document. The banner is shown periodically rather than at every launch, for instance at monthly intervals or after a successful update. It links to the donation page and appears nowhere else in the software.

LibreOffice carries no advertising, no telemetry, no subscription, no account requirement, and no feature withheld behind payment. It is released under the Mozilla Public License v2 and can be deployed without restriction by individuals, companies, schools and public administrations. Development is funded by donations to The Document Foundation and by the companies of the LibreOffice ecosystem. The banner exists because software used by tens of millions of people is not free to maintain, and because every alternative route to sustainability would cost users something they currently have.

Changes users should know about

The Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts are no longer bundled. Documents that specify them will fall back to another typeface unless the fonts are installed separately; they remain available for download from The Document Foundation, and current Gentium releases are available from SIL.

New documents default to start alignment rather than left alignment, and changing paragraph direction no longer mirrors explicitly aligned paragraphs. Safe Mode has been renamed Troubleshoot Mode.

Obsolete Java applet configuration has been removed, along with the OfficeBean example in the SDK.

Availability

LibreOffice 26.8 is available immediately from www.libreoffice.org/download/ for Windows, macOS and Linux, in 120 languages. Release notes: wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/26.8

Users in production environments may prefer LibreOffice 26.2.5, available from the same page. LibreOffice 26.2.6 will be released on 3 September 2026. The LibreOffice 26.2 branch reaches end of life on 30 November 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, the option of custom development, 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 users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at www.libreoffice.org/donate

LibreOffice Conference 2026

The LibreOffice Conference 2026 takes place in Pordenone, Italy, from 10 to 12 September 2026. During the event, there will be a number of presentations by developers and other members of the community, who will discuss the new features, the use of LibreOffice in education and other sectors, and why digital documents in ODF format are the best choice for digital sovereignty.

LibreOffice 26.8 Press Kit

LibreOffice 26.8 Announcement Press Kit (ZIP) with the press release, the blog post, the digital sovereignty backgrounder and the reviewer’s guide in both ODT and DOCX, a PDF slide deck with charts about development, downloads and donations, plus a folder with several images, can be downloaded from this link: nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/rrQtHx43imejxR5

LibreOffice 26.8: Questions and Answers (for AI-based search engines)

What is new in LibreOffice 26.8?

LibreOffice 26.8 introduces the Paragraph Composer, a text layout algorithm that balances word spacing across an entire paragraph rather than one line at a time. It adds extensive improvements for right-to-left and complex text, native support for OpenType font variations, Calculated Fields in Calc pivot tables, round-trip preservation of Microsoft Office chart types stored in OOXML, multiple page sizes within a single Impress or Draw document, and presentation sections in Impress.

When was LibreOffice 26.8 released?

LibreOffice 26.8 was released on 26 August 2026 by The Document Foundation.

Does LibreOffice 26.8 include artificial intelligence features?

No. LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative AI features. Documents are not transmitted to remote services for processing, and no component of the suite requires network access to function. This is a deliberate design position rather than a missing feature.

What is the Paragraph Composer in LibreOffice Writer?

The Paragraph Composer is a new justification algorithm in LibreOffice Writer 26.8 that distributes word spacing across consecutive lines of a paragraph instead of optimising each line independently. Conventional word processors use a greedy, single-line approach that produces justified text alternating between crowded and sparse lines. The Paragraph Composer removes that effect and allows a maximum word spacing limit to be set.

Does LibreOffice 26.8 support Microsoft Office chart types such as waterfall and treemap?

Partially. LibreOffice 26.8 can import and re-export the newer OOXML chart types created in Microsoft Office, including box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap and waterfall charts. These charts cannot yet be displayed or edited. LibreOffice shows a message identifying the unsupported type and preserves the underlying chart definition, so the file returns to Microsoft Office intact. Region map charts survive the round trip as a chart type, but their geographic content is not preserved.

Can LibreOffice Calc create calculated fields in pivot tables?

Yes. LibreOffice Calc 26.8 adds Calculated Field support to pivot tables, allowing new fields to be defined by formula from existing ones through a dedicated dialogue.

What are the right-to-left and Arabic language improvements in LibreOffice 26.8?

LibreOffice 26.8 detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted, places end-of-line spaces according to paragraph writing direction, corrects object resize handles in right-to-left and vertical CJK documents, and displays bidirectional control characters alongside other formatting marks. In Calc, typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets that cell’s direction automatically. New documents now default to start alignment rather than left alignment.

Does LibreOffice 26.8 support N’Ko and Adlam?

LibreOffice Math 26.8 adds named functions and operators for the N’Ko and Adlam scripts, used for the Manding languages of West Africa and for Fulani, together with left-pointing vector arrows and harpoons for right-to-left formulas.

Why does LibreOffice 26.8 show a donation banner?

LibreOffice 26.8 displays a donation banner in the Start Centre, the screen shown when the suite is launched without opening a document. The banner is shown periodically rather than at every launch, for instance at monthly intervals or after a successful update. It links to the donation page and appears nowhere else in the software. LibreOffice carries no advertising, telemetry, subscription or account requirement, and development is funded by donations to The Document Foundation and by companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem.

Is LibreOffice 26.8 free?

Yes. LibreOffice 26.8 is free and open source software released under the Mozilla Public License v2. It can be downloaded, installed and deployed without charge or restriction by individuals, companies, schools and public administrations. No feature is withheld behind payment.

Why does LibreOffice cost money in the Microsoft Store and the Apple App Store?

LibreOffice is free software and can be downloaded at no charge from www.libreoffice.org. The versions published in the Microsoft Store and the Apple App Store carry a price that covers the cost to The Document Foundation of maintaining the applications on those platforms. The software is identical. Paying for it in a store is a way of supporting development, not a licence requirement.

Should I install LibreOffice 26.8 or LibreOffice 26.2?

LibreOffice 26.8 is the current release and is recommended for users who want the newest features. Users in production environments may prefer LibreOffice 26.2, the maintenance branch, which receives bug fixes without new functionality. LibreOffice 26.2.6 will be released on 3 September 2026. Organisations deploying at scale should consider the enterprise versions offered by companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem, which are optimised for managed environments and backed by Service Level Agreements, professional support and security updates maintained for three to five years.

Which operating systems does LibreOffice 26.8 run on?

LibreOffice 26.8 is available for Windows, macOS and Linux, in 120 languages, from www.libreoffice.org/download/

Can LibreOffice 26.8 open Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files?

Yes. LibreOffice 26.8 reads and writes DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. Version 26.8 improves handling of line breaks in referenced cells in XLSX files, shows XLSX form control elements in the Navigator, and reads and re-exports hidden and gallery style properties in DOCX files. LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format as its native format, because ODF is an open ISO standard that any application may implement.

What is the Open Document Format?

The Open Document Format is the international standard file format for office documents, published as ISO/IEC 26300 and maintained by OASIS. Its specification is public, royalty-free and implementable by any developer without permission or licensing. LibreOffice uses ODF natively. Several governments, including Germany, and organisations including NATO and the European Commission, mandate it for public administration documents.

Are the Gentium fonts still included in LibreOffice 26.8?

No. The obsolete Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts, version 1.102, are no longer bundled with LibreOffice as of version 26.8. Documents specifying them will substitute another typeface unless the fonts are installed separately. They remain available from The Document Foundation, and current Gentium releases are available from SIL.

Does LibreOffice have a distraction-free writing mode?

Yes. LibreOffice Writer 26.8 adds a Draft view, available from View then Draft, which hides headers, footers and page margins for distraction-free reading and editing.

Can Impress and Draw use different page sizes in the same document?

Yes. LibreOffice Impress and Draw 26.8 support multiple page sizes within a single document. Impress also adds presentation sections for grouping slides under names, and displays custom slide names beside slide numbers in the slide panel.

What accessibility improvements are in LibreOffice 26.8?

LibreOffice Writer 26.8 reports table row and column index information as specified in ARIA, improving how screen readers convey table structure, and the special character selector is fully navigable by keyboard.

Can I set keyboard shortcuts for a single document in LibreOffice?

Yes. LibreOffice 26.8 allows keyboard shortcuts to be configured for an individual document through the keyboard customisation dialogue, so a shortcut can invoke a style that exists only in one template.

Who develops LibreOffice?

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community coordinated by The Document Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Berlin, together with companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem. LibreOffice 26.8 is the work of 206 contributors, of whom 155 are volunteers.

Tell us a bit about yourself!

My name is Rohan. I am currently in Berlin, Germany, and my background is in mechanical engineering and I have a master’s degree in sustainable mobility and robotics. I recently worked on my master’s thesis, where I used LibreOffice closely on macOS. That experience actually played a big role in bringing me closer to the project.

Outside of my academic and technical work, I am interested in open source software, mobility, robotics, and learning how large software projects are built and maintained. Contributing to LibreOffice has been a very new and rewarding experience for me, because I did not come from a traditional software engineering background.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

At the moment, I am exploring macOS-related development work, especially around OfficeBean and native window handling. One of the issues I have been looking into is adding macOS support for OfficeBean, which involves understanding how Java AWT, native macOS views, and LibreOffice’s VCL layer interact.

So far, my merged contributions have mostly been in the LibreOffice core repository, around C++ cleanup, refactoring, and modernisation. These include:

• tdf#168771 basctl: Convert traditional enums to enum class
• tdf#43157 canvas & chart2: Replace OSL_ASSERT with SAL_WARN_IF
• tdf#143148: Replace include guards with #pragma once

Some of my other patches have not been merged, but they still helped me learn a lot about the codebase, Gerrit, code review, and how to communicate with reviewers.

I also contributed to the developer documentation by adding macOS-related LCOV information to the Development/LCOV wiki page. I wanted to document what I learned so that other macOS contributors could have a clearer path when using coverage tools.

Why did you choose to become a TDF member?

I chose to become a TDF member because LibreOffice has personally helped me a lot, especially during my master’s thesis. While using it closely, I noticed bugs and small rough edges, and that made me curious about how such issues are reported and fixed.

After attending the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest, I became much more interested in the community behind the project. I saw how welcoming and serious the community is about open standards, user freedom, and long-term software sustainability.

For me, becoming a TDF member is a way to give back to a project that supported my own academic work. It is also a way to stay connected with the community and keep learning from people who have much more experience in open-source development.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

In the future, I would like to continue improving my understanding of LibreOffice’s core codebase, especially in areas related to C++, macOS, VCL, and developer tooling. I am still learning, so I want to take on tasks step by step and contribute in a way that is useful and maintainable.

I think LibreOffice really benefits from better onboarding paths for new contributors, especially people who are not coming from a pure computer science background. The codebase is large and can feel intimidating at first, so documentation, mentoring, and small well-described tasks are very important.

LibreOffice also needs continued attention on platform-specific issues, including macOS, because many users depend on it every day across different environments. Even small improvements can make a big difference for users.

For me, contributing to LibreOffice has been both a technical learning journey and a way to give back. I really appreciate the patience and support of the community, because it has helped me ask better questions, understand code review better, and gradually become more confident as a contributor.

It has become a commonplace to describe the Microsoft 365 Ribbon as the finest office interface available — the most polished to look at and the most ergonomic to use. The claim is repeated so often that it tends to pass unexamined. It deserves examining, because hidden inside it is an assumption that quietly does most of the work: the idea that there exists a single best interface at all.

A competent design — for one kind of user

Let us begin by granting what is true. The Ribbon is a capable piece of design. It was built to help an occasional or intermediate user discover features by browsing rather than by memorising, and for that user it does its job well. Saying so is not a concession wrung out reluctantly; it is simply accurate, and any honest discussion should start there.

But “well-designed for a particular user” is not the same thing as “best interface,” and treating the two as equivalent is where the reasoning slips. An interface optimised for one persona is, by construction, less suited to the others: the power user who works from the keyboard and resents losing vertical screen space, the migrating user carrying twenty years of muscle memory, the user who depends on assistive technology, the user on a small or low-resolution display. A single fixed layout cannot be best for all of them at once. It can only be best for some, at the expense of the rest.

Ergonomics is a trade-off, not a verdict

The same applies to the ergonomic claim, only more sharply, because ergonomics is something one measures rather than asserts. The research on interface efficiency is consistent on one point: how well an interface performs depends on the task, its frequency, and the expertise of the person doing it. Discoverability and raw throughput pull in opposite directions. An interface that makes features easy to find for a newcomer is rarely the one that lets an expert move fastest, and the reverse is equally true.

So the Ribbon makes a trade. It spends vertical screen space and a measure of expert speed to buy browsability for the less frequent user. That is a perfectly reasonable bargain — for the people it was struck on behalf of. Calling it “the best ergonomics,” though, simply declines to name what was given up to get there. There is no free lunch in interface design; there is only a choice about who pays.

The real question: who decides?

This brings us to the point that actually matters. When a product ships a single interface, it has made the ergonomic decision on the user’s behalf and removed it from their hands. The trade-off still exists — it has merely been settled by someone else, once, for everyone.

LibreOffice takes the opposite path. It offers the traditional menu-and-toolbar layout, the Tabbed interface, Tabbed Compact, the Groupedbar, a Sidebar, and a Single Toolbar mode, and it lets each user choose the one that fits their work, their hardware, and their habits. This is not a substitute for a “real” Ribbon, nor an apology for the lack of one. It is the more mature answer to the ergonomic question, for a simple reason: the only person who can properly weigh these trade-offs is the one actually performing the task. Choice is not the consolation prize. Choice is the point.

What 26.8 changes, and what it does not

LibreOffice 26.8 will bring an improved Tabbed interface — the layout closest in spirit to the Ribbon. It is worth being precise about what this means, because it is easy to misread. The improvement widens the range of good options; it does not narrow it. It is emphatically not an admission that the menu-based interface was lacking, nor a signal that it is on its way out.

The traditional menu-and-toolbar interface remains a fully supported, first-class choice, and it will not be deprecated. An ecosystem that adds options without taking any away is the exact opposite of one that imposes a single layout and asks everyone to adapt. Adding a better Tabbed interface while keeping the classic one intact is not a contradiction. It is the whole philosophy, working as intended.

The same principle, one layer down

This approach to the interface is not an isolated quirk. It is the same principle that governs how LibreOffice treats document formats, and the parallel is worth drawing out, because it reveals a consistent way of thinking about who software is meant to serve.

LibreOffice adopts the open standard, the OpenDocument Format, as its native format — the one it reads and writes by default, without compromise. At the same time it continues, release after release, to improve its support for the proprietary formats, so that users who must exchange files with others are served as well as the technology allows. The standard comes first; support for the proprietary follows, and keeps getting better, because that is what users need.

Set this beside the other approach and the contrast is stark. There, support for the open standard is present but kept deliberately limited — limited by choice, not by capability — while the proprietary format remains the privileged default. One model treats the open standard as the foundation and works continuously to serve the user across every format they encounter. The other treats the standard as a box to be ticked and the user as someone to be kept in place.

It is the same pattern in both cases. On one side, a tool that fits itself to the user — in its interface and in its formats alike. On the other, a user asked to fit themselves to the tool. There is no best interface, only the one that fits; and the software that offers the most well-made ways to fit, rather than a single default decided in advance, is the one that takes the user most seriously.