Line Break Remover

Text copied out of a PDF, an email or a terminal window usually has a hard line break at the end of every visual line, and pasting it into a document turns every paragraph into a ragged column. This tool joins those lines back together. You can join with a space, keep the blank lines between paragraphs and only join inside each one, glue lines with nothing at all, or turn a column of values into a single comma-separated line.

How to use it

1. Paste the text with the unwanted breaks.
2. Pick how lines should be joined. For articles and PDFs, the paragraph-preserving option is almost always the right one.
3. Leave the collapse-spaces option on to clean up doubled spaces left behind.
4. Copy the tidy text.

When it helps

• Rescuing a paragraph copied from a PDF so it flows like normal text.
• Turning a pasted column into a comma-separated list for a search box or a formula.
• Repairing an email that was hard-wrapped at 72 characters.
• Cleaning up subtitle or transcript files that break every few words.

Good to know

• The "line breaks found" figure tells you how much cleanup happened, a useful sanity check.
• Words that were hyphenated across a line end, like "inter-" and "national", need a manual fix afterwards.
• If the result still looks wrong, your text may use two breaks for a single paragraph gap; try the paragraph option instead of the plain space one.

Why those line breaks are there

Most text on a screen wraps automatically, so the only line breaks are the ones at the end of paragraphs. PDFs and some emails work differently. They place each visual line as its own line, with a break after every one, so that a paragraph is stored as a stack of short lines. Copy that into a word processor and every line becomes its own paragraph, which looks broken.

The fix is to join the lines of each paragraph while leaving the gaps between paragraphs alone. That is what the paragraph-preserving option does. It treats a blank line as the signal that a new paragraph starts, joins everything between blank lines into a single line, and puts the blank lines back.

Worked example: a copied PDF paragraph

Say you copy three lines from a PDF: "The committee met on Tuesday to", "review the proposal and agreed to", "revisit it next month.". Paste them in and choose the paragraph-preserving option. The result is one line: "The committee met on Tuesday to review the proposal and agreed to revisit it next month."

If you copy a longer passage with several paragraphs, each paragraph is joined separately, and the blank lines between them are kept. The line breaks found counter tells you how many breaks existed before the cleanup, which is a useful check that something actually happened.

Other ways to use it

The comma option turns a column of values into a single line, so a list of ten product codes becomes "A100, A101, A102…" ready to paste into a search box or a spreadsheet formula. The glue option joins with nothing, which is useful for rebuilding a long string, such as an API key or a URL, that was wrapped across several lines by an email program.

One thing the tool cannot know is whether a line break was meant. A poem, an address or a list should keep its breaks, so use the tool on prose, not on text where each line stands alone.

Questions