Remove line breaks and extra whitespace

The reason most people arrive here is a PDF. Text copied out of one breaks at the end of every printed line, so a paragraph that reads perfectly on the page arrives in an email as a narrow column of fragments. Paste it, choose how the breaks should be treated, and copy the repaired version back out.

Paragraph mode joins the lines inside each paragraph and keeps blank lines as the boundaries between them. Single-block mode joins everything into one continuous run of text, which suits a quotation, a search query, or an address you are about to paste into a single field. Whitespace collapsing squeezes runs of tabs and spaces down to one, and trimming clears space at the very start and end.

Paragraph mode depends entirely on blank lines being present. Text that separates paragraphs by indentation alone, which is common in copied PDFs, has nothing for the tool to detect, and the whole passage collapses into a single paragraph. When that happens, put a blank line in at each paragraph break first and run it again.

Hyphenation is not repaired, and this is the one worth checking before you send anything. A book or a journal PDF that splits infor- and mation across a line break joins as infor- mation, because guessing which hyphens were typeset and which were typed would silently damage genuine compounds such as well-known. Read the result and fix those joins yourself; there are usually only a handful.

Nothing else is rewritten. Spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, and word choice are left exactly as they were, and non-breaking spaces copied from a web page survive the collapse rather than being flattened into ordinary ones. Windows, macOS, and Unix line endings are all reconciled first, so text assembled from several sources behaves the same way.

Check the output whenever the layout carried meaning. Poetry, source code, log files, and postal addresses use their line breaks deliberately, and joining them destroys the thing that made them readable. The text stays in your browser throughout, which matters when the passage being tidied is a legal letter or a medical report rather than a blog post.