Remove line breaks

How to use it#

1. Paste your text into the box above.
2. Choose keep paragraphs to leave the blank lines between them, or one line to join everything.
3. Pick what goes where each break was: a space, a comma, or nothing.
4. Tick rejoin words split with a hyphen if the text came from a justified PDF.
5. Copy the result, or download it as a text file.

Why text from a PDF has a break at the end of every line#

A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores lines of text at fixed positions on a page, and the reader works out where one line ends by where the next one starts. When you copy from it, each of those lines arrives with a hard break after it. Paste that into an email or a document and the text stops at the old column edge and never reflows.

Emails wrapped at 72 characters, text copied out of a terminal, and subtitles have the same problem. The breaks suited one width of screen and land in the wrong place on any other.

Keeping the paragraphs#

Keep paragraphs removes the breaks inside a paragraph and leaves the blank line between one paragraph and the next. It is the setting to use for prose, because a wall of text with no paragraph breaks is harder to read than the broken version you started with.

One line joins everything, blank lines included. That is what you want for a list, or for a sentence going into a form field that takes a single line.

A space, a comma, or nothing#

A space is right for prose, where each break stood in for the space between two words. Spaces already at either end of a line are trimmed first, so a break never leaves two spaces in a row.

A comma turns a column into a list: a column of email addresses copied out of a spreadsheet comes out ready for the To field. Nothing is for text where the break fell in the middle of something, such as a long link or a code that was wrapped to fit.

Words split with a hyphen#

Justified text in a PDF often breaks a long word across two lines with a hyphen, like docu- at the end of one line and ment at the start of the next. Joined with a space, that leaves docu- ment in the middle of your sentence.

Rejoin words split with a hyphen puts those words back together. It only acts when a letter and a hyphen end a line and a lowercase letter starts the next, which is what a split word looks like. It cannot tell a split word from a hyphenated one that happened to break at its hyphen, so self- and aware becomes selfaware. It is off until you tick it, and worth a read through afterwards.