Remove line breaks

Text copied out of a PDF, an email or a terminal arrives broken every seventy characters. This joins the lines back into flowing text that will re-wrap properly wherever you paste it.

Where the stray line breaks come from

A PDF has no paragraphs. It has glyphs at coordinates, and the extractor guesses where the lines were — so copying a paragraph out of one gives you a hard return at the end of every visual line. Paste that into a document with a different column width and the text breaks in the wrong places, permanently.

Plain-text email is the other big source. The convention of wrapping at 72 to 78 characters dates from terminals and is still baked into mail clients and mailing lists, so quoted replies arrive pre-broken. Terminal output, chat logs and text pasted out of a fixed-width code block all have the same shape.

The fix is to remove the breaks that were only there for display and keep the ones that mean something.

Paragraphs versus wrapped lines

The distinction that matters is between a line break inside a paragraph, which was purely visual, and a blank line between paragraphs, which is structure. This tool joins every line into one continuous run, which is what you want for a single mangled paragraph.

For a longer document where the paragraph breaks matter, work paragraph by paragraph, or join everything and then re-split — it is faster than it sounds and considerably faster than fixing a document where all the structure was flattened at once.

Each line is trimmed before joining and empty lines are dropped, so you never end up with double spaces or a gap in the middle of a sentence where a blank line used to be.

Worked example

The quarterly report showed
growth in three regions,
with the fourth flat.

We expect that to change.

The quarterly report showed growth in three regions, with the fourth flat. We expect that to change.

Common questions

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