Remove line breaks

How to Fix the line breaks

1. 1

   Paste the broken text

   Or drop a .txt or .md file up to 5 MB.

2. 2

   Pick what to do

   Join into paragraphs is the default, and the one that fixes PDF text.

3. 3

   Copy or download

   One click for the clipboard, one for a .txt file.

Why PDF text arrives broken

A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores where each piece of text sits on the page, and when you copy from it the viewer reconstructs reading order by putting a line break at the end of every visual line. Paste that into anything with its own line wrapping and you get a ragged column with a break every eight or nine words. The fix is to join lines within a paragraph while keeping the blank line between paragraphs, which is what the default mode here does, and why it is the default rather than joining everything into one line.

Undoing hyphenation without breaking real hyphens

PDFs also break words across lines with a hyphen, so "understand" arrives as "under-" and "stand". Removing every hyphen before a line break would also destroy "well-known", "twenty-four" and every other genuinely hyphenated word that happened to wrap. The rule used here requires a lowercase letter on both sides of the hyphen: syllable breaks always have one, and compound words very often have a capital or a number on one side. It is not perfect, and it is right far more often than the naive version.

One sentence per line

A different job with the same starting point: instead of joining lines, put each sentence on its own. This is what you want before diffing two versions of a document, before feeding text to a translation memory, or when reviewing prose line by line. Finding where sentences end means handling "Dr. Smith", "e.g." and "3.14" correctly, which this page does with the same rule its word counter uses rather than splitting on every full stop.

Wrapping to a width

The reverse operation: take flowing text and break it at a fixed column, the way plain-text email, commit messages and code comments want it. The wrapping is greedy and word-aware, and a word longer than the width gets its own line rather than being cut in half: a sliced URL stops being a link, and a sliced identifier stops being an identifier.

The invisible characters

Text from PDFs and websites often carries soft hyphens and zero-width spaces: characters you cannot see, which survive copy-paste and quietly break searching, line-length counting and word matching later on. They are removed here before anything else happens, which is worth knowing if you have ever wondered why a search for a word that is visibly present finds nothing.

Frequently asked questions