LibreOffice launches extension and templates repository for public beta test

Developers invited to contribute their add-ons Community-based review process ensures quality and reliability LibreOffice, the free office productivity suite, can be enhanced with hundreds of extensions and templates. Users can download these smart extras to improve the suite’s functionality to fit their job or hobby, and developers can easily write their own add-ons and share it with millions of users worldwide. Since, at the moment, there is no reliable and stable source for downloading these handy add-ons, the LibreOffice community has put great efforts into launching a public repository. It does not only provide extensions and templates for LibreOffice, but also for OpenOffice.org and other compatible office suites. Users of these can benefit from the work and the commitment of our community, and are invited to have a look at recent versions of our product, which already has included has the most popular extensions, and comes with many new features. The new site is now in public beta testing at http://extensions-test.libreoffice.org and http://templates-test.libreoffice.org and has been created in cooperation with the Plone community, on whose technology it is based. To ensure the quality and reliability of the offered extensions, a community-based review process is currently set in place: Community volunteers

The Document Foundation has its own visual identity

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

Community Member Monday: Adlair Cerecedo-Méndez

( 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

New “LibreOffice Expert 2026/2027” magazines available for schools and local communities

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): What you want to do with the magazines How many you want (1 – maximum 5 copies) The address to which we should post them Include all of that that information in an email to us with subject

LibreOffice 26.8 and the languages for which nobody is paid

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

LibreOffice 26.8 brings professional typography, deeper support for the world’s writing systems, and no artificial intelligence

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