Broken Hangul Fixer Guide

Open the app — Broken Hangul Fixer

Have you ever opened a file made on a Mac in Windows and found 강물 unravelled into ㄱㅏㅇㅁㅜㄹ?
Or received an annotated classical text where the letters sit crooked, like 쥬역언ᄒᆞㅣ?

The first is split jamo, the second is Old Hangul assembled wrongly.
In both cases nothing is lost — the assembly has simply come apart — so with the right rules it can be put back.
This tool does that assembling for you.

How to Use

What Can Be Restored

Basic Steps

1. Paste the text into the Input Text box. If it’s your first time, press [Sample] to load an example.
2. If you need to type Old Hangul yourself, use [Araea (ㆍ)] to insert the character.
3. Click [Convert].

Results come out in two forms. Pick the one that fits where you’re taking it.

• Unicode standard, conjoining (Source Han Serif) : Searchable and safe to paste anywhere. Choose this for the web or a database.
• Non-standard, precomposed (PUA) (Hancom HCR) : Only for environments that support PUA, such as Hancom Office.

Typing Araea (ㆍ)

The jamo you meet most often in Old Hangul is araea (ㆍ).
It was a vowel in Hunminjeongeum that disappeared from modern spelling.
Yet if you work with annotated classics or idu material you run into it hundreds of times a day — ᄒᆞᆨ, ᄒᆞᆫ, ᄉᆞᄅᆞᆷ.

The problem is that no modern IME offers a way to type it.
Not 2-set, not 3-set, not Windows, not macOS.
You ended up memorizing the code point U+318D or U+119E and inserting it from a character map.

So I made a button that drops araea at the cursor.

There are shortcuts too.

The period key was chosen because its shape resembles araea, making it easy to remember, and because it doesn’t collide with browser shortcuts on either platform.

Here is how the insertion works.

• The character actually inserted is the compatibility jamo ㆍ (U+318D). It’s plain text, so you can copy it anywhere.
• On conversion it is promoted internally to the conjoining vowel ᆞ (U+119E) for assembly.
• The cursor stays where it was, so typing continuously or inserting mid-word both feel natural.

To build an Old Hangul syllable, type initial → araea → (final).
Type ㅎㆍㄴ and you get ᄒᆞᆫ.
Type two vowels in a row and they combine into a diphthong: ㅎㆍㅣ → ᄒᆡ.

Automatic Direction Detection

You don’t have to choose which way to convert. The input decides it.

• If any PUA character is present → PUA is unpacked into conjoining jamo.
• Otherwise (compat jamo, split jamo, or conjoining only) → after normalization, modern Hangul is assembled into standard precomposed syllables and Old Hangul into conjoining form.

In real material a single file often holds several forms at once.
Rather than asking the user to judge every time, it seemed better to look at the input and decide.

Good to Know

About Fonts

For the result to display properly the font has to cooperate. Old Hangul especially.

Standard conjoining results are shown in the web font Source Han Serif Korean VF.
It fully supports conjoining-jamo shaping (GSUB ljmo/vjmo/tjmo), so a sequence like ᄒᆡ is drawn as one syllable, not three loose letters.
Without that font the assembly is correct but the jamo appear scattered on screen — which is exactly why the web font is bundled.

Non-standard precomposed (PUA) results are drawn in HCR Batang.
Where HCR is absent you’ll see tofu boxes, and that is not a malfunction.
Hanyang PUA is a private-use area to begin with, so it only renders where that font exists.

Data Source

The mapping between PUA and conjoining jamo uses 5,661 entries derived from the hypua2jamo library.

Upload

Click the Upload button in each app to load text files.

Supported formats: .txt, .md, .html, .xml, .tsv, .csv

Save

Download the converted result with the Save button.

Copy

Copy the result to your clipboard with the Copy button.

Open the app — Broken Hangul Fixer