Line Break Remover

Set "Replace With" to Space first

Do this before anything else, because the default will not do what you want.

Out of the box, breaks are replaced with nothing at all. So this:

The quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog

comes back as The quick brown foxjumps over the lazy dog — the words on either side of the break run together, because there was no space at the end of the first line and none was added.

Change Replace With to Space and you get The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, which is almost certainly what you were after. Then switch on Remove extra spaces to clean up any doubles that result, and you have a single clean paragraph.

Leave it as Nothing only when you are joining fragments that should touch — a long number or code split across lines, or a URL broken by an email client.

If you are fixing text copied from a PDF, read this

The most common reason people need this tool, and it needs an honest answer.

Text copied out of a PDF has a hard line break at the end of every visual line, because that is how a PDF stores text — as lines placed on a page, not as flowing paragraphs. Paste it anywhere and you get a narrow column that will not reflow, with a break every eight or nine words.

What you ideally want is to remove the breaks inside paragraphs while keeping the blank lines between them, so the structure survives. This tool cannot do that in one pass. Removing single breaks removes every break, paragraph gaps included, so you end up with one continuous block of text.

Two ways to handle it:

For a few paragraphs — which is most cases — flatten the whole thing with Replace With set to Space, then put the paragraph breaks back by hand where you want them. On three or four paragraphs that is faster than any clever alternative.

For something long, do it in two steps using Custom text. First run it with only Double line breaks ticked and Custom text set to a marker that will not appear in your text, such as @@PARA@@. Copy that output back into the input box, tick only Single line breaks with Replace With set to Space, and run it again. Now you have one flat block with @@PARA@@ sitting exactly where each paragraph began — and a find-and-replace in your editor turns those into real breaks in one action.

Clunky, and it works reliably on a long document.

What the three "Remove" boxes actually do

All three start ticked, which is worth understanding rather than accepting.

All line breaks overrides the other two. While it is ticked, every break goes regardless of what the others say — so if you want any control at all, untick this one first.

Single line breaks removes every break in the text, including the pairs that form paragraph gaps. The name suggests it leaves paragraph breaks alone; it does not.

Double line breaks removes runs of two or more breaks — the gaps between paragraphs — and leaves the breaks inside them. That is the opposite of what most people want, and it is genuinely useful in one case: collapsing a double-spaced list into a single-spaced one.

The five extra options

These do the tidying that usually needs doing at the same time, and they run in a fixed order.

Trim each line and Remove empty lines are applied before the breaks are touched — which is the right order, because a "blank" line containing a stray space is not empty until it has been trimmed. Tick both when cleaning up a messy paste.

Remove extra spaces collapses any run of two or more spaces into one. Almost always worth having on, especially alongside Replace With → Space.

Remove tabs converts tabs to single spaces. Useful for text copied out of a spreadsheet or a code editor — but be careful, because a tab is the column separator in pasted spreadsheet data. Removing tabs from a pasted table destroys the columns.

Trim start/end strips whitespace from the very beginning and end of the whole text, applied last.

The line under the boxes reports how many breaks and how many extra spaces were removed, which is the quickest way to confirm a setting did what you expected — if it says zero, something is not ticked.

What this is good for besides PDFs

Flattening a list into one line — a column of email addresses, tags or keywords that needs to become a comma-separated string. Set Replace With to Custom text and type a comma and a space.

Pasting into a single cell or field. A multi-line block pasted into a spreadsheet cell spreads across several rows; flatten it first and it stays in one.

Cleaning up text from a chat or an email, where quoting has added breaks in arbitrary places.

Preparing text for a character-limited field — a meta description, a social bio, an SMS — where the breaks are wasting characters or being stripped anyway.

Nothing is uploaded

All of it happens in your browser as you type. Nothing is sent anywhere, which is worth knowing given how often the text being cleaned up is a draft, an extract from a contract, notes from a meeting or a list of addresses.

Related tools

Duplicate Line Remover handles the other common list problem — the same entry appearing twice, exactly or approximately. Text Case Converter fixes capitalisation on text that came out of a PDF in the wrong case, and Word Counter counts the result.