Remove line breaks
Transformed in your browser · nothing is uploaded
Joins every line into one paragraph: each line is trimmed, blank lines are dropped, and what is left is joined with a single space. It is the standard repair for text copied out of a PDF, where every visual line arrives as a hard line break.
How to use the remove line breaks
A PDF has no concept of a paragraph. It positions glyphs on a page, so copying reconstructs breaks from wherever the lines happened to fall, and pasting that into something with its own wrapping gives you a ragged column that reflows badly. Plain-text email does the same thing for a different reason: it is hard-wrapped at around 72 columns before sending — and so does anything copied out of a terminal. Joining the lines puts the paragraph back together so the text can wrap to whatever width it lands in.
Two things the join cannot know. A hyphen at the end of a line might be a word split across the break or a real hyphen, and there is no way to tell inter- + national from well-known, so hyphens are always kept and split words need a pass with find and replace. And every break goes, the genuine paragraph ones included: join one paragraph at a time if the structure matters. Note also that joining only trims the ends of each line; runs of spaces inside a line survive it, which is why the clean option is worth running first.
Questions
A PDF stores positioned glyphs rather than paragraphs, so a copy turns the visual line endings into real breaks.
No. It joins the lines and keeps the hyphen, because that hyphen is indistinguishable from the one in well-known.
No, every break goes and blank lines are dropped. Join one paragraph at a time if the structure matters.
It flattens smart quotes and dashes, collapses runs of spaces and removes blank lines, but it leaves the lines as lines. Use it as a first pass, then join.
Choose Join with commas and set the separator field. The plain join always uses a single space.
Joining only trims the ends of each line. Clean the text first, or run the whitespace remover over the result.
Yes. A CRLF paste joins the same way, with no stray carriage returns left in the paragraph.