Hangul (word processor)

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Hangul Word Processor
Hangul 2002
Hangul 2002
Korean name
Hangul:
한글 or 한/글 or 아래아 한글
Revised Romanization: (Araea) Han-geul
McCune-Reischauer: (Araea) Han'gŭl

Hangul (also known as Hangul Word Processor or HWP) is a proprietary word processing application published by the South Korean company Haansoft Corporation.

Hangul's support for the special needs of the Korean written language has gained it widespread use in South Korea. Microsoft Word and Hangul are used alongside each other in many South Korean companies.

Haansoft was on the verge of bankruptcy in after the release of its 2002 version, due to the widespread use of illegal copies. A widespread campaign to support the development of Korean software and promote the purchase of legal copies of Hangul allowed Haansoft to recover.

Hangul saves documents in HWP format, with the filename extension *.hwp. HWP files, up to the versions created with Hangul '97, can be opened with OpenOffice.org. However, files created with later editions of Hangul, including Hangul Wordian, Hangul 2002 and Hangul 2005, cannot be opened with OpenOffice.org, due to the major changes in the document structure. These later versions of Hangul provide adequate support for Microsoft Word .DOC format, the de facto standard in word processing applications. These versions also provide an English user interface depending on the location setting of the user's environment.

Haansoft offers an online version of Hangul called "Nethangul" that can be used from computers connected to the internet for a moderate fee.

To open HWP files in a non-Korean Windows system, users can download and execute a conversion program [1], which enables files to be opened with Microsoft Word. This program, however, can only be used with files created with Microsoft Word 2000 and below. Haansoft has also a Hangul document viewer program freely available on its website called "Hangul Viewer 2005" (한/글 뷰어 2005) [2].

Contents

[edit] Versions

Hangul has many versions, the latest of which is Hangul 2007 for Windows and Hangul 2006 for MacOS.

Previous versions have included:

MS-DOS
Hangul 0.9, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 (1989)
Hangul 1.2L, 1.3L (1990)
Hangul 1.5, 1.51, 1.52 (1991)
Hangul 2.0 Pro/Basic (1992)
Hangul 2.1 Pro/Basic/Test/Little (1993)
Hangul 2.5 (1994)
Hangul 3.0 (1995)
Hangul 97 Strengthen version
Enlarge
Hangul 97 Strengthen version
Windows
Hangul 3.0, 3.0a, 3.0b (1995)
Hangul 96, International, Japanese (1996)
Hangul 97, 97 strengthen, 815 special edition (1998)
Hangul Wordian, Hangul for Kids (2000)
Hangul 2002 (2001)
Hangul 2004 (2003)
Hangul 2005 (2004)
Hangul 2007 (2006)
MacOS
Hangul 96, 97 (1998)
Hangul 2006 (2006)
Unix
Hangul X 1.0, X 3.0 (1995)
GNU/Linux
Hangul X R4 (1999) - this version was distributed by Mizi Research, a Linux software company.
Hangul X R5 (2000)
Other related software
Net Hangul (2002, Hangul 2002 SE based)
Documan (Hangul with USB storage)
Nexel (spreadsheet software)

[edit] Advantages

Hangul, as well as other Haansoft products, is a more affordable alternative to non-native comparable programs such as Microsoft Word. Furthermore, Hangul is widely supported in Korea and has a large user base; many Koreans begin their word processing life with Hangul, not with Microsoft Word.

Hangul provides more support for specific Korean language features than international programs; Hangul comes with a wide selection of fonts and not only suports Korean hanja, Chinese traditional and simplified hanzi, and Japanese kanji and kana, but even Gugyeol characters and obsolete hangul.

[edit] Disadvantages

Although the HWP format has become a standard in Korea similar to DOC, PDF or RTF files in other countries, the program and format is not widely used outside Korea.

A notable difference to other common word processors is that it is not always possible to simply copy text from HWP documents and paste it elsewhere, as it might appear as garbled text depending on the program. For example, hangul text copied from a HWP document will not display as hangul when pasted into Windows' Editor (NOTEPAD.EXE) under Western locale Windows, but will be displayed as hangul when pasted into Mozilla Firefox.

A workaround to this problem is opening the HWP file with Open Office, albeit with some restrictions.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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