How the line-break remover joins your text
Everything is normalised first: Windows (\r\n) and old Mac (\r) endings become a plain \n. Then one of two paths runs, depending on the "Keep paragraph breaks" checkbox, which is on by default.
- Keep paragraph breaks on: the text is split wherever two or more consecutive line breaks occur. Inside each block, every run of line breaks becomes a single space and the block is trimmed. The blocks are then rejoined with one blank line between them.
- Keep paragraph breaks off: every run of line breaks, blank lines included, becomes one space, so the whole text turns into a single line.
The second checkbox, "Collapse extra spaces", reduces any run of two or more spaces or tabs to one space. Joins always use a space, never nothing, which is correct for English but wrong for languages written without word spaces.
Worked example
Text copied from a PDF with hard wraps and two paragraphs:
The quick brown fox jumps over
the lazy dog and keeps run-
ning across the field.
A second paragraph starts
here.With paragraphs kept, the result is two lines of flowing text: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and keeps run- ning across the field. followed by a blank line and A second paragraph starts here. With the option off, all of it becomes one 113-character line with no blank line in between.
Edge cases and limits
- Hyphenated wraps. The tool does not undo hyphenation, so
run-followed byningbecomesrun- ning. A quick fix is the Find and Replace tool in regex mode: find(\w)- (\w)and replace with$1$2. Be aware that this also joins genuine compounds such as "well- known". - Whitespace-only separator lines. A paragraph gap only counts when the line breaks are consecutive. If the "blank" line actually contains spaces, the text is not split there and the two paragraphs merge. Run the text through the Text Cleaner first if that happens.
- Lists and addresses. Each item sits on its own line deliberately, so joining them loses the structure. Use this tool for prose, not for lists.
- Single spaces at line ends. A space already sitting before a break is kept alongside the added one, which is why collapsing spaces is worth leaving on.
To turn a joined block back into one item per line, run it through the find and replace tool and swap the separator for a line break (regex mode accepts \n).