Un-shatter your pasted text
Copy a paragraph from a PDF, an old email, a subtitle file or a terminal window, paste it anywhere, and you get confetti: a hard line break every ten words, exactly where the original layout — not the meaning — demanded one. Re-joining lines by hand, delete-key by delete-key, is purgatory. This tool fixes the whole text at once, with three modes that cover every flavour of the problem, updating live as you adjust.
How to clean your text
- Paste the broken text into the top box.
- Pick a mode (see below) — the result renders instantly in the bottom box.
- Copy result and paste it where it was always meant to go.
Three modes for three diseases
Replace with spaces — the default cure for PDF-itis: every line break becomes a space, gluing fragments back into flowing sentences, with double-spaces tidied automatically. Remove entirely — joins lines with nothing between them; for reflowing CJK text, repairing data strings split mid-token, or stitching a broken URL/code line back together. Keep paragraphs — the intelligent mode: blank lines (paragraph boundaries) survive, while single breaks within paragraphs dissolve into spaces. This one repairs whole documents — a multi-paragraph article from a PDF keeps its structure while every paragraph internally reflows.
Why PDFs do this to you
PDF is a page-layout format: it stores each visual line as positioned text, and “this line ends here because the column is 8 cm wide” is indistinguishable from “this line ends here because the sentence does”. Copying extracts the visual lines, breaks included. Emails have a sibling disease — historic mail standards wrapped text at 72 characters, and forwarding nests it further. Subtitles (.srt) break lines for screen-width reasons. All three paste into this tool and come out as prose.
Small print that saves surprises
- Hyphenated words at line ends (“conver-” + “sion”) re-join as “conver- sion” — a quick find-replace of “- ” afterwards (our Find & Replace tool) polishes those.
- Lists need the paragraph mode: blank-line-separated items survive; tightly-stacked items will merge — re-add breaks where you want them.
- Combine with Word Counter to confirm nothing was lost: word count is identical before and after (only whitespace changes).
Paste shattered, copy whole — the five-second cure for the most annoying disease in copy-paste medicine.
Quick reference
| Property | Detail |
|---|---|
| Modes | Breaks → spaces / remove entirely / keep paragraphs |
| Best for PDFs | “Keep paragraphs” preserves document structure |
| Whitespace | Double spaces auto-collapsed, edges trimmed |
| Update | Live as you type or switch modes |
| Content | Words never altered — whitespace only |
| Sources cured | PDFs, emails, subtitles, terminals, OCR |
| Processing | 100% in-browser, no upload |
Frequently asked questions
Which mode should I use for text copied from a PDF?
“Keep paragraphs.” It dissolves the artificial breaks inside each paragraph while preserving the blank lines between paragraphs — the document's real structure survives, the layout damage doesn't.
What happens to words that were hyphenated across lines?
They rejoin with the hyphen plus a space (“conver- sion”). Run a quick find-and-replace for “- ” → “” afterwards — our Find & Replace tool makes it one click. (Auto-fixing this blindly would corrupt real hyphenated terms.)
Will my bullet lists survive?
In paragraph mode, items separated by blank lines survive as units; tightly-stacked single-line items merge into one flow. For lists, clean the prose paragraphs first, then reconstruct tight lists manually.
Does the tool ever change my words?
Never — only whitespace is touched. Run the before/after through the Word Counter: identical word counts, different line counts. That's the whole operation.