The problem
Copy a paragraph out of a PDF and you rarely get a paragraph. You get the shape of the page — a line break wherever the text happened to reach the right margin. Paste that anywhere that reflows text and it arrives as a ragged column that will not wrap.
Email quoting does the same thing, as do plain-text exports, code comments and anything that has passed through a terminal.
The three modes
- Keep paragraphs — the one you almost always want. A single line break inside a paragraph becomes a space; a blank line between paragraphs is preserved. This is what turns a PDF column back into prose.
- Remove every break — collapses the whole thing into one continuous line. Useful for a single quote, a value going into a form field, or anything that must be one line.
- Only blank lines — leaves the line breaks alone and closes up the double-spacing. Useful for lists that arrived with a gap between every item.
Tidy spaces, on by default, also collapses runs of spaces and strips the whitespace hanging off the ends of lines — the other half of the same mess.
When “keep paragraphs” gets it wrong
The rule is structural: a break with text either side of it is treated as a wrap, and a blank line is treated as a paragraph. That is right for prose and wrong for a few things:
- Poetry and lyrics, where every break is deliberate
- Addresses and signatures, which are short lines by design
- Lists without blank lines between items — these will be joined into one paragraph
For those, use “Only blank lines”, or paste the affected section separately.
Common questions
Is my text uploaded?
No. Everything runs in this page.
What about hyphens split across lines?
Text from a PDF often breaks a word with a hyphen at the end of a line. The Text Cleaner rejoins those as well as fixing quotes, bullets and invisible characters — use it when the paste is generally messy rather than just badly wrapped.
Can I get the original back?
Yes. The input box is untouched, so you can change modes and compare, or start again.
