Open Hangul (HWP) files natively in Dropbox

Here's another tool for your Hangul HWP file toolbox. Dropbox now let's you preview any HWP file natively right inside the Dropbox interface. 

If you're a Dropbox user, no more having to install a seperate app or plug-in or sign-up with some online converter or viewer. Just preview the file directly just like any other file inside your Dropbox storage. 

Here's a promo animation showing how it looks:

Promo of HWP viewing in Dropbox. Image: ZDNet Korea

Of course I had to try it myself. Here is a random HWP file I found online, displayed in the standalone Hancom Viewer app:

And here is the same file in the Dropbox preview:

Not bad. Everything looks good. Some minor spacing differences, but overall the tables came out clean, images are good, font differences appear. Not bad. 

From within this Dropbox preview, you can highlight text, so if you just need to extract the content of the document, this is doable. You can't directly edit it, but you can Print it, which means you can also save it as a PDF using your browser/computer's "Print to PDF" function. 

For comparison, here's how the same document appears in the preview mode of my Google Drive right now. Yikes!

Previously, Dropbox integrated with Polaris Office to allow you to open and edit HWP files by clicking-through to their online office suite from within Dropbox. See:

•  드롭박스, HWP 문서 바로보기 지원 - ZDNet korea
• Use "Polaris Office" to edit Hangul (HWP) files

But as far as I can tell, that built-in functionality is gone. Anyway you can still just use Polaris or Hancom Docs online, connected to your Dropbox (or other cloud storage) account, to get the same basic feature set. 

This is just one of many methods for opening and working with HWP files. As of this post, just using Hancom Docs online is my preferred method if you don't want to pay for the full local suite installation. But there are plenty of other methods still available, many of which I've mentioned before here:

🔗 10원 Tips: "HWP" label search