Remove line breaks from text

Why copied text breaks

A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores lines of text placed on a page, so copying from one gives you a line break at the end of every printed line, often in the middle of a sentence. Other sources do the same:

• Plain-text email, which is often wrapped at about 72 to 78 characters a line; the email standard recommends lines of no more than 78.
• Scans and photos: image to text gives you the words line by line, just as they sat on the page.
• Subtitle files, where one caption is split over two lines.
• Old text files and terminal output, wrapped to fit a screen.

Paste that into a document, a form or a chat and you get ragged lines that end in odd places. Joining them gives the text back the shape it was written in.

Join broken lines or Remove all line breaks?

To Text Studio, a paragraph is a block of lines with an empty line before and after it, and a line that holds only spaces counts as empty. That is how Join broken lines tells the breaks you want gone from the ones you want to keep.

It follows that on a text with no empty lines at all, the two choices give the same result: one long block. Add the paragraph gaps first, or select one paragraph at a time, and Join broken lines has something to keep.

Things to check after joining

• No empty lines in the copy. Some PDFs space their paragraphs apart on the page without leaving an empty line in the text. Press Enter at each paragraph start before joining, so the gaps exist.
• Lists and headings join onto the next line. Leave an empty line after them, or select only the running text.
• Words broken with a hyphen at a line end come out as “exam- ple”. Open Find, turn on Pattern, find (\p{L})- (\p{L}) and replace with $1$2. A word that really has a hyphen, such as well-known, loses it too if it broke at that spot, so read the result.
• Quoted email replies keep the > mark at the start of each old line, and joining moves those marks into the middle of sentences. Remove them before joining: with Pattern on, find (^|\n)> ? and replace with $1.

From a list to one line

Remove all line breaks turns a column of items into one line separated by spaces. When the items need commas, as in addresses for the To box or tags for a form, use find and replace instead: turn on Pattern, find \s*\n\s*, replace with a comma and a space, and choose Replace all. Three lines reading apples, pears and plums become “apples, pears, plums”.

Microsoft Word can do a similar job: its Replace box finds ^p, a paragraph mark, and ^l, a manual line break, and can swap them for a space. The catch is that ^p also ends every real paragraph, so they all run together unless you mark the real breaks first. Join broken lines tells the two apart by the empty line.