Clean Copied PDF Text

Clean text copied from PDFs online

This PDF text cleaner repairs hard line wraps, rejoins high-confidence split words, removes soft hyphens, normalizes unusual spaces, preserves paragraph breaks, tries to preserve lists and structured lines, shows each important change, keeps the original input unchanged and runs locally in the browser.

PDF text cleaning example

A hyphen-
ated word and wrapped
PDF lines should become
one paragraph.

This line contains a non-breaking space.

A hyphenated word and wrapped PDF lines should become one paragraph.

This line contains a non-breaking space.

Expected summary: split words repaired 1, wrapped lines joined 2, paragraph breaks preserved 1, special spaces replaced 1.

Fix wrapped lines and broken paragraphs

PDFs often store visual lines rather than logical paragraphs. Copying can insert line breaks at every visual line. The cleaner can replace paragraph-internal line breaks with spaces while blank lines remain paragraph boundaries when preservation is enabled. Lists, headings and table-like structures require heuristic handling and should be reviewed.

Repair words split by PDF hyphenation

PDFs may split words at visual line endings. Soft hyphens and visible hyphens are different. Conservative mode repairs high-confidence cases such as docu- followed by ment. Aggressive mode may remove valid hyphens, and existing compounds such as well-known are preserved where possible. Review the change log before publishing.

Remove soft hyphens and unusual spaces

U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN is an invisible discretionary hyphen. U+00A0, U+202F, U+2007 and U+2009 are common special spaces. The cleaner can replace them with ordinary spacing where enabled. Zero-width characters are handled by the Invisible Character Detector and related removal tools.

Preserve lists, headings and paragraph breaks

The cleaner tries not to merge bullet items, numbered list items, blank-line paragraph boundaries, likely headings, code-like lines or table-like rows. Heading and table detection are heuristic, so structured or technical text still needs inspection.

PDF text cleaning vs OCR correction

This tool cleans text already copied or extracted from a PDF. It does not accept PDF uploads, read PDF files, perform OCR or reliably correct recognition substitutions such as c0de instead of code. It may improve spacing and wrapping in OCR-generated text, but full OCR correction requires source-aware review.

How to use the cleaner

1. Paste text copied from a PDF into the input field.
2. Select the line, hyphenation, spacing and structure options.
3. Run the PDF text cleaner.
4. Review the cleaned text, change counts and warnings.
5. Inspect uncertain dehyphenation or structural changes.
6. Copy the cleaned text or download the cleaning report.

Common use cases

• Remove hard line breaks from copied PDF paragraphs.
• Repair words split by visual-line hyphenation.
• Replace non-breaking spaces in research papers.
• Clean copied book, article and report text.
• Prepare extracted PDF text for notes or documents.
• Preserve paragraph boundaries while joining wrapped lines.
• Review hidden spacing characters before publishing.
• Clean formatting artifacts in OCR-generated text.

Privacy and local processing

Cleaning runs with JavaScript directly in your browser. Your pasted text is not submitted to UnicodeNow servers.

Frequently asked questions