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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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). So, what has the team been working on recently? Here’s a quick summary:

Release Engineering

• Tagged, built, and distributed LibreOffice 26.8.0 Release Candidate 2
• Enabled MAR updates for cross-updates from 25.8.7 and 26.2.4 to 26.2.5
• Reviewed patches
• Tested new Windows build bots in production
• Investigated and fixed incorrect permissions in daily Debian packages

Scripting

• Investigated an extension developer’s issue exporting BASIC macros as an extension
• Identified a debug-build assertion that does not appear to affect release builds
• Added a UI test to help prevent future regressions in macro export

Code and Accessibility

• Discussed proposed accessibility improvements on the LibreOffice accessibility mailing list
• Analyzed and fixed tdf#172831: customized NotebookBar tab names were not localised after upgrading
• Released LibreOffice Viewer for Android 26.2.5 on Google Play, F-Droid, and the Meta Horizon Store
• Discussed tdf#172885, a LibreOffice-specific Qt theme/style. Explored an upstream Qt stylesheet-environment-variable approach, then implemented LibreOffice command-line support for setting the stylesheet
• Posted and reworked the macOS-specific parts of the Qt VCL work
  • Reworked the changes in response to comments, then merged them
• Worked on generalising macOS scaling patch
• Made the Reset button dialog action ID well-known across the codebase

QA

• Announced LibreOffice 26.8 RC1 availability for testing
• Upgraded external libraries:
  • NSS to 3.126
  • libffi to 3.7.1
• Improved automated tests:
  • Factored common code from CppunitTest_sc_swarmsolvertest
  • Added ARRAYTOTEXT function tests as FunctionsTest
• Fixed crashes and warnings:
  • Fixed a null-pointer dereference warning in Writer
  • Fixed a crash in ThemeExport::write
  • Fixed a crash in OutMarkdown_SwTableNode
• Tested and commented on Qt6 style and theming work for tdf#172885
• Completed hiring tasks and code reviews
• Investigated regressions involving CJK font names and the CJK bullets gallery
• Fixed two build/SDK issues:
  • Fixed a build issue with Visual Studio 2026 18.7.0
  • Fixed missing cross-platform .NET binding files in the SDK (tdf#165585)
• Continued work toward resolving headless Windows/fontconfig build issues required for Qt6 on Windows

Mentoring

• Reviewed six substantial patch submissions
• Completed GSoC mentor tasks

Design

• Triaged Bugzilla tickets
• Participated in the weekly UX and ESC meetings
• Published extensions and managed comments
• Supported community growth through the @libodesign social media account
• Completed several design reviews
• Prepared the Base survey
• Contributed patches:
  • tdf#115805: corrected increments in numbering dialogs
  • tdf#172739: harmonized NotebookBar tab order

Documentation

• Updated online Help with fixes for Master, 26.2, and 25.8
• Updated Help pages through bug triage, contributor patch reviews, fixes, and housekeeping
• Contributed Help improvements, including:
  • Adjusted left margins for paragraphs in tables
  • Refactored the AutoCorrect Options page
  • Updated documentation for “To page” anchoring
  • Added “Page Break” to Find & Replace attributes
  • Reverted removal of “Page Style” from Find & Replace attributes
  • Muted localisation processing in selected Python and BASIC code lines
• Supported ongoing community updates …

When governments and organisations talk about “digital sovereignty,” they usually mean one thing in practice: the ability to choose, control, and if necessary replace the software they depend on — without asking permission from a vendor.

It sounds simple. It rarely is.

Document software sits at the centre of almost every organisation’s operations. Contracts, reports, budgets, policy documents, public communications: they all live in files. And for decades, the format of those files — and therefore the tools required to open, edit, and share them — has been controlled by a single commercial entity. That is not sovereignty. That is dependency with a friendly interface.

LibreOffice Technology exists to make genuine sovereignty possible. Not as a promise, and not as a political statement — but as a technical architecture that removes the dependency by design.

This post explains what LibreOffice Technology actually is, why it is categorically different from a “free alternative to Microsoft Office,” and why it is the only open platform capable of supporting software that is fully compatible with the demands of digital sovereignty. It also reviews what several months of deployments, policy decisions, and one very public debate over what “sovereign” actually means have confirmed about that architecture since we first started making this argument.

Beyond the Application: LibreOffice Technology as a Platform

Most people who encounter LibreOffice encounter it as an application — a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, a presentation tool. That is a reasonable introduction, but it misses what makes LibreOffice Technology significant.

LibreOffice Technology is the underlying platform on which LibreOffice — and a growing number of other products — is built. It is a modular, open-source software framework for creating document applications. It includes rendering engines, import/export filters for dozens of file formats, scripting infrastructure, accessibility layers, and interfaces for integration with operating systems, cloud environments, and enterprise software stacks.

Think of it the way you might think of a general-purpose operating system kernel: the kernel itself is not what users interact with directly, but it is what makes everything else possible — and it is what determines whether the system is genuinely open or merely open-looking.

LibreOffice Technology is governed by The Document Foundation (TDF), a non-profit foundation incorporated under German law. Its source code is publicly available, its governance is transparent, and its development is carried out by a global community of contributors from dozens of countries and organisations — including Collabora, allotropia, Red Hat, and many others.

No single company controls it. No acquisition can change its licence. No pricing decision by a distant board can determine whether your organisation can keep using it next year.

That is what a platform for digital sovereignty looks like.

Open Standards Are Not Optional: The Role of ODF

Sovereignty over software is meaningless if the data is not equally free.

A document format is not just a technical specification. It is a commitment about who can read your files in ten years, which tools can process them today, and whether you are locked into a particular vendor’s …

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m Aleksi, and I live in Oulu, northern Finland. I graduated this spring with a bachelor’s degree in business information technology, and before that I did a vocational degree in software development. Work-wise, my background is in software engineering: I worked on a secure Android smartphone, mostly fixing operating system bugs.

Outside of that, I’m into retro computing: old machines, old phones, and the software that ran on them. There is a lot to learn from software written back when it could only be shipped on physical media. Every time I sit down with a piece of old software, I notice a detail I want to try building myself: an interesting design decision that makes the UI stand out, or a feature that makes me wonder how on earth it was done.

I also like to hang out at my local hacklab and volunteer at gaming festivals. And of course, I like to work on LibreOffice too. What makes LibreOffice interesting to me is that its codebase has a long history. Reading the code and going through the commits allows me to look back in time and see how the software has evolved over the years.

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

I’m currently working on smaller code fixes. I pick up bugs from Bugzilla, try to reproduce them, and ultimately submit a patch that fixes the issue. In a codebase the size of LibreOffice one can’t just aimlessly duct tape a solution and hope it works. One has to understand the root cause to be able to look in the right place and understand the effect that the change has on the bigger picture.

Coming from a background of debugging Android, I quite enjoy that part of the work. Also, everyone in the community is genuinely great to work with. Code reviews in particular taught me a lot, when a more experienced developer pointed out something that I’d never have spotted myself.

Why did you choose to become a member of The Document Foundation?

Becoming a member felt like a way of saying that I’m in this for the long term rather than just passing through. Before I started contributing, I was a bit scared of putting code out under my own name. I felt like my code wouldn’t be good enough, and that I could only contribute to open source after decades of development experience.

Boy, was I wrong. Going through the issues thoroughly (the community likes to leave hints in Bugzilla comments), understanding the problem, and submitting the best patch I could manage turned out to be enough. Having a mentor and the community’s support on IRC, where I could ask questions whenever I needed to, helped a lot too.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

I’m planning to move from smaller fixes towards more interesting bugs (our Bugzilla doesn’t contain any …

The LibreOffice Conference 2026 will take place in Pordenone, Italy, from September 10 – 12. And now the schedule is online, with:

• 8 conference tracks
• 64 sessions
• 49 speakers

Click here to view the schedule