Show the Working

HWPX to Markdown

Your document never leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make this work. That is worth more here than on most pages: a document is usually the one thing on a computer somebody would mind a stranger reading, and the ordinary way to convert one is to upload it to a company that then has it.

…or drop one anywhere on this page.

Markdown, for anywhere that takes it — a repository, a wiki, a static site.

This is the common need behind “convert my Word file”: something written in a word processor has to go somewhere that expects Markdown. Headings, emphasis, lists, quotes, code, links and tables all have Markdown equivalents and are carried across. What does not is named below rather than quietly dropped.

A Hancom Office document is a ZIP of XML, which is why this needs nothing

Rename a .hwpx to .zip and open it: inside is the document as XML, its styles, its relationships and its pictures as ordinary files. Your browser can already unzip — that is what DecompressionStream is — and reading XML needs no library. So the whole job happens here, with nothing fetched and nothing uploaded.

A heading in an HWPX file does not say “heading”. The paragraph points at a set of paragraph properties, and those carry <hh:heading type="OUTLINE" level="0"/> — which is the heading, at level nought, meaning an h1. Ordinary text carries type="NONE" in the same place. The name is never read, and that is deliberate: the style is called 개요 1 on a Korean installation, with engName="Outline 1" beside it, and matching either would work on every test file and fail on somebody’s renamed style. The same reason an OpenDocument file’s italics are resolved to what the style declares rather than to what it is called.

What does not come across, and why

The page layout, deliberately: margins, page size, headers, footers, page numbers, columns and anything positioned on a page. None of that means anything in a document that reflows to fit a phone. Fonts, colours and sizes go the same way — what is kept is what they were expressing: a heading, a quotation, emphasis, a list.

Three things a Hancom Office document can hold that do not survive, and you should know before you rely on this: tracked changes, comments and footnotes. A reviewed document converted here comes out as the text with the changes accepted and the discussion gone. If those matter, they have to come out of the original.

It does not open .doc — the pre-2007 Word format, which is not a ZIP at all but a compound binary document, and a different job entirely. Save it as .docx first and it will open here. It does not open .pages, and it will tell you if you hand it a spreadsheet or a presentation rather than failing silently.

Why there is no HWPX to PDF here

Because it is not a conversion, it is typesetting. A PDF fixes text to a page of a particular size with particular margins and particular fonts, and something has to choose all of those and decide where every break falls. Your word processor already does that, with the choices in front of you, and its “export as PDF” is the right tool. A converter that made those decisions silently would have made them for you.

Where to go next