3 ms·

The word processor by Hancom is actually pretty nice, especially for composing Korean-only and mixed Korean-and-English documents. I've been using it since befo

by kijin 7y ago

The word processor by Hancom is actually pretty nice, especially for composing Korean-only and mixed Korean-and-English documents. I've been using it since before I even knew that MS Word existed, and I still prefer it to MS Word for anything that contains CJK characters. The proprietary file format is a PITA, though. Hancom did release a Linux version of their office suite a few years ago, and regularly updates the OSX version. Moreover, Hancom has been dabbling in Linux for over 20 years. They even maintained their own Red Hat-based distro at some point. They also support OpenDocument and OOXML fairly well. In short, Hancom has been hedging their bets very thoroughly. So if the government adopts Linux by any chance, it won't be difficult for them to go fully cross-platform and keep their lucrative government contracts.

a-afterglow 7y ago
Have you been using it since its first release? I find it surprising you hadn't heard about MS Office if you were already using Hancom.
- kijin 7y ago
  Yeah, I've used H.ngeul since 1990 -- version 1.2 I think. MS Word already existed, of course, but I didn't hear about it nor actually get to use it until a few years later. I was a kid and didn't have internet back then, so news was slow :p
- snowwindwaves 7y ago
  WordPerfect had a large early market share
lasagnaphil 7y ago
To explain the history a little bit (as a Korean): Hancom's Hangul software was popular in Korea in the 90s because of its splendid Hangul support (Word wasn't that good at it back in the day). So it became a de-facto "standard" for Korean documents. But the problem was, piracy was really rampant at the time, because it was before online DRM protection technologies came into light. (They've tried hardware DRM, like the serial port dongles, which eventually were cracked.) They almost went bankrupt, up to the point where Microsoft was thinking about buying them out (there are a lot of conflicting info about this in the internet, so I don't know exactly what deal might have gone through) But then, when Koreans learned about this imminent danger, they launched a national campaign to save the company, and raised over $10 million for them. As for why this was possible: nationalism was pretty strong back in the late 90s, partly because of Korea's IMF crisis. (If you want to read more about the Korean economic recession and how people responded to it with activism, read more about the Gold-collecting campaign in 1998 [0]) Because of this, Hancom was able to recover and still be alive to this day. Nowadays more and more Koreans are using Word these days, but Hancom's software still has lots of uses, especially in the government. The Hangul word processor had some unique characteristics other than just language support: most notably it was one of the first word processors to have nested table support. Because of this, many Hangul documents have layouts made of nested tables (I know some people at HN would be utterly disgusted with this, but this has many benefits: you can have total control of your document layout, and it's good for making documents with dense information such as government forms.) This is why Hangul documents cannot be simply converted to Word; the two have very different conventions about layout in general. To conclude, reflecting this as a Korean (and an avid Linux user), I have both good and bad feelings about this. On one hand, Koreans were forced to use a proprietary, non-free program to open their documents, including important government stuff. This also sucks for Mac and Linux users (The Mac version was horrible the last time I've used it, and I couldn't get the Linux version to install on Arch Linux). On the other hand, if Hancom wasn't alive, then Koreans would be forced to use Microsoft Word with subpar Korean support (because Microsoft wouldn't really care about Korean language support unless there was competition). While I have mixed feelings about Hancom, I really hope that they would provide good support for Linux users in Korea. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-collecting_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-collecting_campaign
- kijin 7y ago
  It's not just layout (which goes way beyond nested tables -- I always go for Hangul when I want sub-millimeter precision) but also typography that makes a huge difference. Hangul was built from the ground up to accommodate the needs of CJK typography. You can tell that Word was never designed with CJK typography in mind when you write a sentence in English, try to add a word in Korean, and watch in horror as the entire line (and sometimes the entire page!) jiggles up and down while Word tries to figure out the line spacing (leading). By default, Word doesn't know how to keep leading consistent when you mix CJK and Latin characters in the same line, resulting in a very unprofessional-looking document. Hangul gets it right the first time. On the other hand, Word blows Hangul out of the water when it comes to Latin typography.

by kijin 7y ago

a-afterglow 7y ago

Have you been using it since its first release? I find it surprising you hadn't heard about MS Office if you were already using Hancom.

kijin 7y ago
Yeah, I've used H.ngeul since 1990 -- version 1.2 I think. MS Word already existed, of course, but I didn't hear about it nor actually get to use it until a few years later. I was a kid and didn't have internet back then, so news was slow :p
snowwindwaves 7y ago
WordPerfect had a large early market share

lasagnaphil 7y ago

To explain the history a little bit (as a Korean): Hancom's Hangul software was popular in Korea in the 90s because of its splendid Hangul support (Word wasn't that good at it back in the day). So it became a de-facto "standard" for Korean documents. But the problem was, piracy was really rampant at the time, because it was before online DRM protection technologies came into light. (They've tried hardware DRM, like the serial port dongles, which eventually were cracked.) They almost went bankrupt, up to the point where Microsoft was thinking about buying them out (there are a lot of conflicting info about this in the internet, so I don't know exactly what deal might have gone through) But then, when Koreans learned about this imminent danger, they launched a national campaign to save the company, and raised over $10 million for them. As for why this was possible: nationalism was pretty strong back in the late 90s, partly because of Korea's IMF crisis. (If you want to read more about the Korean economic recession and how people responded to it with activism, read more about the Gold-collecting campaign in 1998 [0]) Because of this, Hancom was able to recover and still be alive to this day. Nowadays more and more Koreans are using Word these days, but Hancom's software still has lots of uses, especially in the government. The Hangul word processor had some unique characteristics other than just language support: most notably it was one of the first word processors to have nested table support. Because of this, many Hangul documents have layouts made of nested tables (I know some people at HN would be utterly disgusted with this, but this has many benefits: you can have total control of your document layout, and it's good for making documents with dense information such as government forms.) This is why Hangul documents cannot be simply converted to Word; the two have very different conventions about layout in general. To conclude, reflecting this as a Korean (and an avid Linux user), I have both good and bad feelings about this. On one hand, Koreans were forced to use a proprietary, non-free program to open their documents, including important government stuff. This also sucks for Mac and Linux users (The Mac version was horrible the last time I've used it, and I couldn't get the Linux version to install on Arch Linux). On the other hand, if Hancom wasn't alive, then Koreans would be forced to use Microsoft Word with subpar Korean support (because Microsoft wouldn't really care about Korean language support unless there was competition). While I have mixed feelings about Hancom, I really hope that they would provide good support for Linux users in Korea. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-collecting_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-collecting_campaign

kijin 7y ago
It's not just layout (which goes way beyond nested tables -- I always go for Hangul when I want sub-millimeter precision) but also typography that makes a huge difference. Hangul was built from the ground up to accommodate the needs of CJK typography. You can tell that Word was never designed with CJK typography in mind when you write a sentence in English, try to add a word in Korean, and watch in horror as the entire line (and sometimes the entire page!) jiggles up and down while Word tries to figure out the line spacing (leading). By default, Word doesn't know how to keep leading consistent when you mix CJK and Latin characters in the same line, resulting in a very unprofessional-looking document. Hangul gets it right the first time. On the other hand, Word blows Hangul out of the water when it comes to Latin typography.