Remove Line Breaks

Each line break is swapped for one space, and the spaces or tabs hugging it go with it, so the end of one line and the start of the next meet with a single gap. Two clean-up rules apply to the whole text at the same time:

• doubled spaces anywhere, not only at line ends, are cut to one, so word1 word2 becomes word1 word2;
• leading and trailing spaces disappear.

Tabs are only touched when they sit next to a line break or come two or more in a row. A lone tab in the middle of a line, as in Name:, tab, Ana, is kept.

Text copied from a PDF, an email or a terminal often has a hard break at the end of each visual line:

The result is one line:

Notice that the empty line between the two paragraphs is gone as well. The paragraph break was just two line breaks in a row, and both were replaced, leaving one space.

Every line break is removed, including the ones that separate paragraphs, and there is no setting to change that. If you need to keep paragraph structure, paste and convert one paragraph at a time, then put the blank lines back yourself.

For lists, think about what should separate the items before you flatten them. alpha, beta and gamma on three lines become alpha beta gamma, which is hard to split again later. Add a comma at the end of each line first if you want alpha, beta, gamma.

When you copy across a page break in a PDF, the page number, running header or footer often comes along as its own line. Once the lines are joined it lands mid-sentence. A copied passage such as the results were, 12, Quarterly Report, consistent with turns into the results were 12 Quarterly Report consistent with, and the stray words are easy to miss.

Before flattening a long extract, scan the original for lines that are only a number or repeat the document title, and delete them. Slide notes and scanned text have the same problem with slide numbers and column headings.