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 …

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 …

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!

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:

( 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 …

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.