Why is HWP used so much in Korea?

HWP (Hangul Word Processor) is the native format of Hancom Office Hangul, the word processor that dominates South Korean government, military, education, and judicial sectors with effectively zero market penetration outside Korea. Developed by Hancom since 1989, HWP has been the de-facto standard for Korean-language documents for three decades - government ministries, public schools, universities, courts, and the National Assembly all default to HWP. Microsoft Word's market share in South Korean government workflows is essentially nil; any official document received from a Korean ministry is almost certainly HWP.

Converting HWP to HEIC renders each page at the document's set page size - typically A4 in Korean office workflows - and encodes it as a HEIC image at roughly half the file size of a JPG render. Hancom's typography engine handles Hangul (Korean alphabet) characters, hanja (Chinese characters used in Korean), mixed-script documents, vertical-text layouts, and right-to-left numbering used in classical Korean academic writing; HEVC encoding preserves those dense glyph edges with fewer artifacts than JPG at comparable sizes. The converter routes through LibreOffice's HWP importer (stable since 2014) plus Hancom's own freeware Viewer for files written by Hangul 2018 and later which use the newer HWPX variant.

Korean government workers receiving HWP documents from ministries while traveling with only an iPhone, foreign embassies in Seoul translating Korean memos on Mac-based teams, multinational corporations handling Korean subsidiary paperwork, and academic researchers reading Korean-language papers on iPads are typical audiences - all cases where the HEIC output opens natively with zero installs. For Windows-based recipients convert the result via HEIC to JPG. For editable handoff use Hancom Office (roughly 80 USD per year, Windows / Mac) or the free Hancom Office Viewer (read-only, Windows / Mac / mobile). LibreOffice Writer's HWP support is functional for HWP 5.x files (2003-2017) but imperfect for newer HWPX.

Reasons to convert HWP to HEIC usually come down to compatibility, file-size, or specific feature requirements. Common situations:

• An app or platform only accepts HEIC uploads.
• You need a feature unique to HEIC (e.g. transparency, vector scaling, animation, multi-page pages, etc.) that HWP doesn't provide.
• You're optimising file size — modern formats often produce smaller files than the older format you started with.
• You need a single archival format across a project so files behave consistently in the same viewer.

1. Open the HWP → HEIC tool on heic.now.
2. Drag your HWP file onto the drop zone, or click Select files. You can drop a whole folder of files at once.
3. The output is fixed to HEIC. If the format supports extra options (page size, transparency background, quality, EXIF stripping), tweak them in the right-hand panel.
4. Click Convert. The job runs on our server and finishes in a few seconds for typical photos.
5. Download the result. Files stay in storage for 24 hours and are then permanently deleted.

The entire flow is free for the first 10 jobs per day with no signup required. A free account doubles that quota; a premium plan removes the limit entirely.

• Hancom Office Viewer is free for read-only HWP access on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android via hancom.com - install it if you regularly receive HWP files.
• Korean fonts (Malgun Gothic, Batang, Gulim, Dotum) must be available on the conversion server for proper rendering - this converter ships with the standard Korean font set.
• HWP files from Hangul 2018+ default to HWPX (the newer ZIP-based variant); HWP 5.x (2003-2017) used a proprietary binary format. The converter handles both.
• Reading converted pages on an iPhone or iPad? HEIC opens natively in Photos and Files - the entire document archive takes about half the space of JPG equivalents.
• LibreOffice opens HWP 5.x reasonably well on Mac and Linux - File > Open and select the file. HWPX support is more limited; route through this converter for those.