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