What is HWP?

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 JPG renders each page at the document's set page size - typically A4 in Korean office workflows. 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. The converter routes through LibreOffice's HWP importer (stable since 2014) plus Hancom's own freeware Viewer for HWP files written by Hangul 2018 and later which use the encrypted HWPX variant.

Korean government workers receiving HWP documents from ministries while traveling internationally, foreign embassies in Seoul translating Korean memos, multinational corporations handling Korean subsidiary paperwork, and academic researchers reading Korean-language papers are typical audiences. For editable handoff use Hancom Office (110,000 KRW or 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 JPG usually come down to compatibility, file-size, or specific feature requirements. Common situations:

• An app or platform only accepts JPG uploads.
• You need a feature unique to JPG (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 → JPG tool on jpg.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 JPG. 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.
• For embassies and academics, the free Hancom Viewer is sufficient for read-only work; full Hancom Office is needed only for editing.
• 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.