Hangil Korean Pad

• Getting started
• Keyboard
• Romanization
• 두벌식
• Settings
• Troubleshooting
• Privacy
• Contact

Getting started

Click the toolbar icon and a compact window opens, detached from the browser. Type — in romanization or on the standard 두벌식 layout — watch the syllables assemble themselves as you go, then press Ctrl+Enter and it is on your clipboard. Nothing to install at the operating-system level, and nothing to configure.

Ordinary Korean is written in Hangul alone, so this is a complete input method rather than a useful fragment. There is no hanja conversion and nothing is waiting on a candidate list.

Which way to type

The abc / 두벌식 switch sits in the header, left of the 한글 / 영문 one and built the same way: it shows which method is in use and takes you to the other. Ctrl+Shift+K does the same thing.

Romanization is the default, unless your browser is already in Korean, in which case 두벌식 is. A Korean speaker who has found this tool has already said which one they want; a learner gets the friendlier one.

The window stays open

It does not close when it loses focus. That is deliberate — the whole point is to type Korean here and then click into another window to paste. It also remembers its size and position, and your text is still there the next time you open it.

The window will not open

If clicking the toolbar icon appears to do nothing, the pad is probably already open behind your current window, or positioned on a monitor that is no longer connected. Clicking the icon again brings the existing window forward rather than opening a second one. To reset a window that has ended up off-screen, see Troubleshooting.

What it looks like

Keyboard

On a Mac, use ⌘ wherever the table says Ctrl — the pad relabels these keys for you, and accepts either one.

The opening shortcut is rebindable. Go to chrome://extensions/shortcuts, or edge://extensions/shortcuts on Edge — you will need to paste that into the address bar, since neither browser allows a web page to link to it.

The 한글 / 영문 switch

Ctrl+K, or the switch in the header. 영문 passes every keystroke through untouched, for URLs, English words, passwords, and ㅋㅋ mixed with Latin. On 두벌식 every letter key produces a jamo, so this is not a nicety but the way out. The accent colour changes with the mode, so you can see which one you are in without typing to find out.

Romanization

One spelling per letter, the same in every position. g is ㄱ everywhere and k is ㅋ everywhere, which is what makes this reversible where Revised Romanization is not — RR writes 한국 as hanguk, spelling the same ㄱ two different ways depending on where it lands.

Consonants

• ㄱg
• ㄴn
• ㄷd
• ㄹr · l
• ㅁm
• ㅂb
• ㅅs
• ㅈj
• ㅊch
• ㅋk
• ㅌt
• ㅍp
• ㅎh
• ㅇng

Tense consonants

• ㄲgg
• ㄸdd
• ㅃbb
• ㅆss
• ㅉjj

Each doubles its own letter rather than taking RR's spelling: ㄲ is gg, not kk. That is deliberate. ㅋㅋㅋ is how Korean laughs online, and kk meaning ㄲ would make it untypeable — so kk is left free to mean exactly what it looks like.

Vowels

• ㅏa
• ㅐae
• ㅑya
• ㅒyae
• ㅓeo
• ㅔe
• ㅕyeo
• ㅖye
• ㅗo
• ㅘwa
• ㅙwae
• ㅚoe
• ㅛyo
• ㅜu
• ㅝwo
• ㅞwe
• ㅟwi
• ㅠyu
• ㅡeu
• ㅢui
• ㅣi

The silent ㅇ

You never type it at the start of a syllable — a vowel with nothing in front of it is given one, so an is 안. At the end of a syllable it is spelled ng, and a following vowel takes it apart again: bang is 방, but hangug is 한국, because the g is followed by a u.

The hyphen, and when you need it

A hyphen ends the syllable. This is not an invention of the pad's: RR's own specification prescribes exactly this, for exactly this reason, with 중앙 jung-ang against 준강 jun-gang.

You need it whenever a syllable ending in a consonant is followed by one starting on a vowel, because those really are the same letters in the same order and nothing can tell them apart:

This catches every 이, 은 and 을 particle after a consonant-final noun, so it comes up more often than it first looks. Type -- when you want a literal hyphen.

Syllables that build themselves

Blocks assemble the way an IME assembles them. A finished syllable gives its final consonant up to open the next one the moment a vowel arrives, and half a compound final leaves while the other half stays. Nothing is ever re-converted behind you — what changes is only the syllable you are still inside.

If the spellings feel wrong

People who know Revised Romanization will meet some friction: 떡볶이 is ddeogbogg-i here, not tteokbokki. That is the price of a scheme that inverts, and 두벌식 is one click away if you would rather not pay it.

The 두벌식 layout

The standard Korean keyboard. One key, one letter; no hyphens and no ambiguity, because all of the difficulty above is an artefact of romanization and simply does not exist here.

Keys are read by position, not by the letter your operating system thinks you pressed, so the layout is unchanged on an AZERTY or Dvorak keyboard — and it agrees with a physical Korean keyboard, which prints Hangul on these same QWERTY positions.

The letter under each key is the key you press; the small blue jamo in the corner is what Shift gives. Seven keys have one: the five tense consonants, and ㅒ and ㅖ.

세벌식 is not supported.

Settings

The settings panel opens from the gear in the pad's header. Your preferences follow your browser profile, so the same choices show up on your other machines.

The typing guide, in a window of its own

The panel carries the reference chart for whichever input method is in use, at a size meant for glancing at. The book icon in the header — or Open this guide in its own window, under the chart — puts the same chart in a second window beside the pad: letters big enough to read across a desk, worked examples, and − / + for anyone who wants it larger still.

It is a reading copy, not a second set of settings. It follows the input method, language and font the pad is set to, and closes when the pad does. Both charts are drawn from the engine's own tables, so a spelling the guide teaches is by construction one the pad accepts.

Writing surface

Ruled lines, or 원고지 squares. Both accept both scripts, so the choice is purely cosmetic and nothing about your text changes when you switch.

The 원고지 cell is measured rather than assumed — Hangul does not advance a full em in the fonts people actually have, whatever the design drawings say — so Korean lines up with the squares on any machine. Latin only does when the installed face happens to draw it at half a cell, and the panel says plainly when it does not.

Font and size

Five families — Gothic 고딕, Myeongjo 명조, Dotum 돋움, Gungsuh 궁서 and Monospace 고정폭 — and any size from 18 to 56 px. Text is set large by default, because the people who need this tool are often still learning to read it.

The fonts come from your own computer rather than being downloaded, which means the list depends on what you have installed. See the font note under Troubleshooting.

Starting over

Three controls at the foot of the panel undo things: Reset all settings to defaults, Reset the window size and position, and Erase the text and its history. The first two do not touch what you have typed; the third is meant to.

Interface language

English, 한국어, 日本語, 简体中文, 繁體中文 and ไทย. The pad follows your browser's language by default, and the setting overrules it — because plenty of learners run an English browser while wanting a Korean interface, or the reverse.

Privacy

Hangil Korean Pad collects no data of any kind. Nothing you type leaves your machine.

The extension makes no network requests at all, and it has no access to any web page — no host permissions, and no content script running on the sites you visit. The Korean fonts come from your own computer rather than being loaded from the web. There is no third-party code in the extension, and no account, analytics or telemetry.

It asks for two permissions, and that is the whole list:

If your browser profile is signed in and syncing, your settings travel with it between your own machines through your browser's own sync, the same way your bookmarks do. That is a browser account feature and not a service run by us — we operate no servers and receive nothing.

This page itself is a web page on hangil.app and, like the rest of the site, carries Google's advertising tag for measurement. That applies to your visit to this page only. It is not part of the extension, and the extension loads nothing of the kind.

Support and contact

Questions, bug reports and suggestions are welcome by email: gilbertr@gmail.com.

For a bug report, these three things make it far easier to work out what happened:

• Your browser and version — chrome://version or edge://version has it
• Your operating system
• What you typed, which input method you were in, and what appeared instead of what you expected

This is a small tool maintained by one person, so a reply may take a few days.

The pad is free and stays free. Every feature is there from the moment you install it — no account, no trial, no upgrade. There is a tip jar at the foot of the settings panel for anyone who wants to say thanks, and it is a link and nothing more: no reminders, no counting, and nothing held back behind it.

Writing Japanese as well? Hangil Kana Pad is the same pad for hiragana and katakana.