About This Tool
Copying text from PDFs, emails, or web pages almost always introduces unwanted line breaks. Every line in the original document ends with a hard return, turning flowing paragraphs into choppy fragments when pasted into a text editor, CMS, or email draft. Manually deleting each line break is tedious, especially in longer documents with hundreds of lines. This free line break remover fixes formatting problems in seconds. Paste your text, select a processing mode, and get clean output instantly. Remove all line breaks to join text into a single line, collapse excessive blank lines, split text into one sentence per line, or merge paragraph lines while preserving paragraph spacing. Six different modes cover every common text cleanup scenario. No signup required and your data stays completely private.
Processing Modes Explained
- Remove All: Strips every line break and joins the text into a single continuous line. Choose what to replace breaks with — a space (most common), nothing (concatenate directly), or a comma/semicolon for list formatting.
- Single Line Breaks: Collapses multiple consecutive blank lines into a single line break. Three or four blank lines become one. Useful for cleaning up text with excessive vertical spacing.
- Double Line Breaks: Reduces runs of blank lines to a maximum of one blank line (double line break). Preserves paragraph structure while removing extra whitespace between sections.
- Break After Periods: Removes all existing line breaks, then adds a new line after each sentence-ending period. Creates one-sentence-per-line output that is useful for translation, editing, and version control diffs.
- Break After Commas: Removes existing breaks and splits at every comma. Turns comma-separated lists into vertical lists for easier reading and processing.
- Paragraphs Only: The most intelligent mode. Merges lines within the same paragraph into flowing text while preserving blank lines between paragraphs. This is the best mode for fixing PDF copy-paste formatting.
Fixing PDF Copy-Paste Problems
PDF documents store text with fixed line lengths matching the printed page width. When you copy text from a PDF, every printed line gets a hard line break inserted at the end. A paragraph that should flow continuously becomes 8-10 short lines.
The "Paragraphs Only" mode solves this perfectly:
- It detects paragraph boundaries (blank lines between text blocks)
- Within each paragraph, it joins all lines with spaces
- It collapses multiple spaces into single spaces
- Paragraph spacing is preserved in the output
The result is clean, flowing text that matches the original document's paragraph structure without the artificial line breaks from the PDF renderer.
Use Cases for Adding Line Breaks
Sometimes you need to add line breaks rather than remove them:
- Sentence-per-line editing: Professional translators and editors often work with one sentence per line. This makes it easy to compare versions, leave comments on specific sentences, and track changes in version control systems.
- CSV/list formatting: Turn a comma-separated string into a vertical list by adding breaks after commas. Each item gets its own line for review or manual editing.
- Code readability: Long single-line data (JSON, CSV, log entries) becomes readable when split at logical points.
- Email formatting: Some email clients strip paragraph spacing. Adding explicit line breaks ensures your message displays correctly across all clients.
How the "Replace With" Option Works
When using "Remove All" mode, the "Replace With" dropdown controls what replaces each line break:
- Space: The default and most common choice. Each line break becomes a space, creating flowing text. "Line one\nLine two" becomes "Line one Line two".
- Nothing: Line breaks are deleted entirely, concatenating text directly. Useful for joining code fragments or merging split words like "impor-\ntant" into "important".
- Comma + Space: Each line becomes a comma-separated item. Useful for converting vertical lists into inline lists for databases, spreadsheets, or scripts.
- Semicolon + Space: Similar to comma but uses semicolons as delimiters. Common in European CSV formats and some database export requirements.
Understanding Line Break Types
Different operating systems use different line break characters, which can cause formatting issues when sharing text between platforms:
- LF (\n): Used by Linux and macOS. A single newline character (Line Feed).
- CRLF (\r\n): Used by Windows. A two-character sequence (Carriage Return + Line Feed).
- CR (\r): Used by legacy Mac OS (pre-2001). Rarely encountered today.
This tool handles all three formats automatically. Regardless of the source operating system, line breaks are detected and processed correctly. The output uses LF (\n) by default, which is universally compatible with modern text editors and web browsers.
Tips for Best Results
Get cleaner output with these techniques:
- Try "Paragraphs Only" first for PDFs: It preserves document structure while fixing line breaks. Use "Remove All" only if you truly want a single block of text.
- Use the "Use as Input" button: Apply multiple processing steps in sequence. First remove excessive blank lines with "Double Line Breaks", then further refine with another mode.
- Check for hidden characters: Some PDFs insert soft hyphens or zero-width spaces that look invisible but prevent proper joining. If words are not merging correctly, try pasting into a plain text editor first.
- Watch the stats panel: The line count and character metrics help verify the tool processed your text correctly. If the output line count seems wrong, try a different mode.
- Download for large texts: For documents over a few thousand characters, use the Download button to save a text file instead of relying on clipboard copy.