::A Geek in Korea::

There is a proprietary, Korean only office document format I’ve been waging war on since my first interactions with Korean business culture. My very first document was sent in “Hangul Word Processing” format, or a “.hwp” file. Heard of a .hwp? Probably not, because it’s the Korean-only equivalent of a Microsoft Word document, except it isn’t widely read by competing document readers.

While Microsoft Word documents used to be this proprietary sort of file that locked people into using the MS Office suite, that has gone away due to programs like OpenOffice that can open a variety of different formats. As of now, OpenOffice can handle most Microsoft documents without a hitch.

However, OpenOffice has problems with the Korean word processor Hangul’s .hwp format. OpenOffice can only read up to a Hangul 97 file, while newer versions of the program break the importing and conversion filters.

While the rest of the world ran on Windows MS Office, Hangul was more popular in Korea because it has Korean only features (Korean Hanja support, better formating, etc…), and is much easier to pirate. If you work in a Korean office, documents are usually handled in both .doc and .hwp formats frequently. My first contract was sent to me in .hwp, and I basically replied with an email saying, “What the heck is this, and how do I open it?” (At the time Abiword had the only Hangul 97 compatibility available. Thus starting my lust for non-MS word processors.)

Recent versions of Hangul broke their ability to be read outside of the proprietary Hangul word processing program. Whenever we had to deal with these files, I usually had to ask the person to resend it to me in a format neutral form, like a .doc or an XML file. I consider sending proprietary formats without asking if people have the means to open them “bad manners”.

A LOT of people don’t value open file formats to any large degree here due to a myopic view of the computer and business worlds. My wife has told her business that she has no way of reading Hangul-only documents, and that they should save them to open formats so that ANYONE can read them without needing to buy that specific program. Her boss told her to go pirate a version of Hangul instead. Actually, he told her to “download it for free from the Internet,” but left it up to her to “find out where” to do that. There certainly no LEGAL way she could find to do that. One of the reasons the makers of Hangul almost went out of business was due to rampant piracy.

Since I’m not going to pirate software on principle (Go go FOSS!), and asking an employee to pirate software to do their job is simply ASTOUNDING, I wanted to find out what other alternatives we had. Short of buying Hangul for Linux or Windows, not much. Nothing else reads this document format. That’s why proprietary software and file formats suck. We want to do work, not worry about what is needed to open a file.

We called my brother-in-law, who happened to have a legit copy of Hangul we could have. He came over and I installed a legal copy of Hanguel 2002 via Virtualbox so that my wife could do work at home. He had a spare, so now we don’t have to worry about this damn format anymore, and we didn’t have to pirate something!

I’ll keep using OpenOffice, but since the Korean translation of OpenOffice isn’t great, my wife can use this as an alternative. I’ll make SURE to teach her how to save things in open formats so that we don’t get locked into using this program and will be able to migrate to an alternative as soon as it is available.