What people ask for is not what they want
"Remove line breaks" is what gets typed into a search box. What is nearly always wanted is to unwrap, and the difference matters enough to be the whole design of this tool.
Text copied out of a PDF or a plain-text email has a break at the end of every visual line. Those breaks are an artefact of the column width it was displayed at. They mean nothing about the writing.
The blank line between paragraphs is different. That one is real, and it is the only thing telling a reader where one idea stops. Delete every break and you get one unreadable block, which is a worse problem than the one you started with.
So unwrapping is the default: artificial breaks joined, real ones kept.
The hyphen is the giveaway, and almost nothing fixes it
A justified PDF splits words across lines to keep the right edge straight. So "established" arrives as two pieces:
a long estab-
lished businessJoin with a space and you get "estab- lished". Join without and you get "estab-lished". Neither is the word, and both are the kind of error that survives a proofread because the eye skips it.
The hyphen has to be removed and the halves closed up, which needs the tool to notice that the hyphen is at a line end rather than in the middle of a genuinely hyphenated word like "well-known". That is what unwrap mode does, and it is most of why the result reads properly.
The invisible one: line endings
Windows ends a line with a carriage return and a newline. Mac and Linux use the newline alone. The carriage return is completely invisible, and it causes exactly the symptoms that make people think a tool is broken: lines that look the same but do not match, whitespace that will not trim, duplicates that survive being deduplicated.
Everything here normalises line endings before it does anything else, which is not tidiness so much as the difference between working on pasted text and quietly not.
The one thing it cannot fix
If the PDF was set in two columns and your copy has taken a line from the left then a line from the right, the words are already interleaved before this tool sees them. Joining them up just produces a longer sentence made of two different sentences.
There is no way to unpick that from the text alone, because the information about which column a line came from was lost in the copy. The fix is to select and copy one column at a time, then run each through separately.
Everything runs on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored, so a contract or a letter with real names in it is safe to paste.
Common questions
Why does removing line breaks turn my text into one huge block?
Because it did what you asked rather than what you wanted. Text copied from a PDF has a break at the end of every visual line, and those are an artefact of the column width. The blank line between paragraphs is a real break and carries meaning. Deleting all of them removes both, so you swap one problem for a worse one. Unwrapping joins only the artificial breaks and leaves the paragraphs alone, which is why it is the default here.
Why are words broken with hyphens in the middle of my text?
A justified PDF splits words across lines to make the edges straight, so "established" arrives as "estab-" then "lished". Joining with a space gives "estab- lished" and joining without gives "estab-lished", and neither is the word. It has to remove the hyphen and close the halves up, which is what unwrap mode does and what almost no other tool bothers with. It is the clearest sign text came out of a PDF.
What is the difference between unwrap and remove all?
Unwrap keeps paragraph structure: a blank line stays a break, a single break mid-sentence gets joined. Remove all flattens the entire thing into one line, which is right when you genuinely want one line, such as pasting into a single spreadsheet cell or a field with a length limit. If your text has paragraphs worth keeping, unwrap is the one.
Why does my text look fine but behave strangely?
Probably line endings. Windows uses a carriage return and a newline, Mac and Linux use just a newline, and the carriage return is completely invisible. It causes lines that look identical to compare as different, and trailing whitespace that no amount of trimming seems to fix. Everything here normalises line endings before doing anything else.
Can I join lines with a comma instead of a space?
Yes, in remove-all mode there is a separator box. A comma and a space turns a column of values into a comma-separated list, which is useful for pasting into a spreadsheet formula or a query. Leave it as a single space for ordinary prose.
What does collapsing blank lines do?
It turns runs of empty lines into a single one and leaves every other break alone. Useful for tidying text that has picked up double or triple spacing between paragraphs without changing anything about how it is wrapped.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. It runs in your browser on your own machine, with no server and no account, and nothing is stored. Contracts, letters and anything else confidential are safe to paste.
Will this fix text copied from a two-column PDF?
Partly. It will unwrap the lines and repair the hyphens, which is most of the work. What it cannot fix is the reading order: if the PDF was set in two columns and your copy has taken a line from the left column then a line from the right, the words themselves are already interleaved and no amount of joining will separate them. That needs re-copying one column at a time.