GUIDE · SPACING

Cleaning text pasted from PDFs, email and web pages

Paste a paragraph from a PDF into an editor and it rarely arrives clean. Lines break in the middle of sentences, spaces double up at the join, and a stray blank row appears every few paragraphs. The words are usually correct — only the packaging is wrong. This guide explains why that happens and how to repair it in seconds instead of retyping.

Why pasted text looks broken

A PDF stores text as positioned characters on a page, not as a flowing paragraph. When you select a column or a page, the copying software guesses where one visual line ends and the next begins. Its best guess becomes a hard line break in your editor — even when the original sentence continued. Email clients and word processors add their own quirks: quoted-reply markers, non-breaking spaces, and indentation carried over from a table cell.

The result is the same three defects, almost every time:

• Hard line breaks mid-sentence, where the source wrapped visually.
• Double or trailing spaces where two regions met or where a line was padded.
• Blank lines that separated blocks in the original layout but mean nothing in plain text.

The fix, in order

Order matters. Clean spacing first, then remove blank lines, then reflow. If you remove blank lines first, you lose the only signal that separated paragraphs; if you reflow first, every hard break becomes a space and double spacing gets locked in.

1. Paste the source into the input panel.
2. Use Clean spacing. Trims leading and trailing whitespace from each line and collapses repeated spaces to one.
3. Use Remove blank lines. Empty rows disappear. Paragraph boundaries stay only where an actual line of text marked them.
4. Review the result. If sentence fragments still sit on separate lines, join them by hand at the two or three remaining breaks — far less work than fixing the whole passage.

What not to expect

Cleaning spacing does not reflow paragraphs into one continuous line, because it cannot tell a mid-sentence break from a deliberate line break in a poem or an address. It also does not remove quoting characters (>) added by email replies, and it does not convert smart quotes or ligatures — those are character substitutions, not spacing problems. For lists rather than prose, switch to the list guides: sorting and deduplication assume one item per line, so a cleaned list should keep its line structure.

Checking your work

The character and word counts in the input and output panels give a fast sanity check. Cleaning spacing should barely change the word count — it removes whitespace, not words. If the word count drops sharply, something more than spacing was removed and the output deserves a closer read before you copy it away.