HWP Character Count

• Characters with spaces: every character, with each space and tab counted as one. A Hangul syllable such as 한 is one character, and so is each Latin letter or digit.
• Characters without spaces: the same, with spaces, tabs and other blank characters left out.
• Words (어절): groups of characters between spaces, which is how Korean word counts work.
• Paragraphs and lines: non-empty paragraphs, and lines split at Enter and Shift+Enter. These are not the lines as laid out on the page.
• 200-character manuscript sheets (원고지): an estimate that starts every paragraph on a new row with one indent cell, at 20 × 10 cells a sheet. The simple figure (characters with spaces ÷ 200) is shown under it.
• Bytes: UTF-8 bytes, which is how most web forms store text (Hangul 3 bytes, ASCII 1), and the older Korean 2-byte count (EUC-KR style: Hangul and other non-ASCII 2 bytes, ASCII 1) that many Korean job sites still show.

Hancom's own Document Statistics dialog (파일 > 문서 정보 > 문서 통계, Ctrl+Q+I) counts spaces and tabs as one character, counts words as 어절, and includes the text inside tables, treating every cell as a paragraph. Its 200-character manuscript count adds headers, footers and footnotes but leaves out tables and text boxes.

This tool starts with body text only, because most 자기소개서 limits are about the answer you wrote, not the form around it. The Like Hancom's Document Statistics button switches on tables and text boxes. Hancom's help does not say whether footnotes and headers are part of its character count, so that preset leaves them off; switch them on if your numbers differ. Our line count follows line breaks, while Hancom counts lines as laid out on the page, and our paragraph count skips empty paragraphs. Hidden comments (숨은 설명), equations and automatic numbers such as page numbers are not counted.

Job sites do not agree on line breaks. Some count every Enter as one character, some as two bytes, some not at all. Line breaks are left out by default; switch on Count line breaks as characters to add one character (and 2 bytes in the Korean byte count) for each break between paragraphs and each Shift+Enter.

The file is read in your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, so drafts of applications and unpublished papers stay private. Password-protected HWP files can be opened with their password, which is only used in the browser. The page range option loads the open source rhwp layout engine (about 4 MB, once) to work out where pages break.