Line Break Remover

Text copied out of a PDF, an email client or a fixed-width terminal arrives with a line break at the end of every visual line rather than at the end of every paragraph. Paste it into a document and it stays broken at the original column width, which is why it looks fine in a narrow column and ragged everywhere else.

Removing every break is the wrong fix, because it welds the paragraphs together too. The distinction that actually works is that a paragraph boundary is normally a blank line — two breaks in a row — while a wrapped line is a single break. This tool works on that rule by default: single breaks are joined, doubles are kept. Where a source has no blank lines at all, the alternative heuristic looks at whether the previous line ended with sentence punctuation, which catches most cases and will occasionally join two sentences that should have stayed apart.

PDF text has a second problem worth handling separately. Justified text is often hyphenated at the break, so joining the lines naively produces "hyphen- ation" in the middle of a sentence. Rejoining those is offered as its own option because it is only ever right for hyphenated line breaks and would damage genuinely hyphenated compounds if applied blindly.

The remaining options are the tidying you usually want in the same pass: collapsing runs of spaces that were doing alignment work, trimming trailing whitespace, and normalising the line ending style, which matters when text moves between Windows and everything else.