HWP to PDF Converter

Hangul, the word processor made by Hancom, has long been the usual writing tool in Korean government offices, schools and many companies. That is why application forms, public notices, school letters, tender documents and university paperwork from Korea so often come as .hwp files, whether you are a student abroad, an expatriate dealing with an embassy, or a company working with a Korean partner.

Outside Korea, those files are hard to open. Microsoft Word does not read them, Macs and phones show them as unknown files, and installing a Korean office suite just to read one notice is a lot to ask. A PDF fixes the layout once and opens everywhere, and that is usually all you need: to read the notice, print the form or attach the document to an email.

It also works the other way round. If you are sending a document written in Hangul to someone abroad, a PDF saves them from asking how to open it.

Two settings are fixed on this page because Korean documents depend on them. The first is page size: Korean offices print on A4, and HWP forms are laid out to the millimeter for that sheet, so the PDF uses A4 rather than Letter. The second is Embed fonts. Hangul documents use Korean typefaces that most computers outside Korea do not have, and without them a viewer shows empty boxes, question marks or a substitute font that pushes text out of its table cells.

With the fonts embedded, the PDF carries everything it needs. The text keeps its spacing inside forms, line breaks fall where the author put them, and the document prints the same on a printer in Seoul or in Toronto. Mixed text in Korean, Chinese characters and English converts in the same pass.

Margins and orientation follow the original document unless you change them. HWP files store their own page setup, including the wide top margins common on official letterheads and the landscape pages used for some tables, and the PDF keeps it. Switch Page size to Same as source if a document was deliberately set up on B5 or another size, so that nothing is rescaled.

Official HWP forms often contain fields you are meant to fill in before submitting. Fill them in Hangul or another program that edits HWP first, then convert: the PDF shows the form exactly as it was saved, and text cannot be typed into its fields afterwards. If you only have the empty form and no way to edit it, print the PDF and fill it in by hand.

For records you must keep, such as a contract or a certificate, choose PDF/A at the top of the tool; it is the archival form of PDF and embeds every font. Several converted documents can be combined with the Merge PDF tool, and other file types, from Word to slides, go through Convert to PDF. Each batch takes up to 20 files of up to 95 MB, and the PDFs are deleted 30 minutes after they are ready.

Older HWP files saved by early versions of Hangul convert as well, as do HWPX files from current versions. If a file will not convert, it may be a different format with an .hwp name, such as a scan saved under the wrong extension, or a document locked with a password. Opening it once in Hangul and saving it again as a current HWP or HWPX usually solves both problems.