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Fix Text from PDF

Repair hyphenated words split across lines and broken spacing from copied PDF text — paste and fix in one click.

PDF documents use end-of-line hyphenation to wrap long words across lines. When you copy and paste this text, the hyphens and line breaks transfer with it, leaving words split in two. Academic papers, legal documents and multi-column reports are especially prone to this. This tool detects and repairs the most common hyphenation patterns, rejoins broken words and normalises the result into clean, readable text — without touching legitimate compound hyphens.
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Runs locally  ·  No data sent to server  ·  Free, no signup

About Fix Text from PDF

PDF documents use end-of-line hyphenation to wrap long words across lines. When you copy and paste this text, the hyphens and line breaks transfer with it, leaving words split in two. Academic papers, legal documents and multi-column reports are especially prone to this. This tool detects and repairs the most common hyphenation patterns, rejoins broken words and normalises the result into clean, readable text — without touching legitimate compound hyphens.

How to use Fix Text from PDF

Paste the copied PDF text into the input box and click Run. The tool removes end-of-line hyphenation, rejoins split words and normalises spacing. Review the output before copying, particularly for words that use hyphens as compound terms rather than line-break markers.

When to use this tool

Use this after copying text from academic papers, legal documents, ebooks, scanned reports or any PDF with narrow columns or justified text where hyphenation is heavy. It is particularly valuable before feeding content to AI tools, search indexes, content management systems or any downstream process that expects clean prose.

Privacy

PDF text cleanup is one of the most time-consuming manual editing tasks. This tool automates the most common repair patterns, handling hundreds of broken words in seconds rather than minutes of find-and-replace work. All processing runs in your browser — no text is sent to a server.

Frequently asked questions

Why does PDF text have hyphens and broken words after copying?

PDFs store text as visual lines rather than logical sentences. When a word is too long for the line, the PDF renderer splits it with a hyphen. Copying the text preserves these visual line boundaries, including the hyphens, even though they are not part of the actual word.

Will it fix all broken words?

The tool handles the most common pattern: a word broken with a hyphen immediately before a line break, followed by the continuation in lowercase. It does not fix words split without a hyphen, or words broken mid-character by scanned-image PDFs.

Can it damage real compound hyphens?

The tool specifically targets hyphens that precede a line break followed by a lowercase letter. Hyphens in the middle of a line — such as in compound words like well-known or up-to-date — are not affected.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?

Only on searchable PDFs where you can select and copy text. Scanned PDFs that are image-based require OCR software to extract text first. Once you have the extracted text, this tool can clean up the hyphenation.

Should I run this before or after Remove Line Breaks?

Run this tool first. It repairs hyphenated words and rejoins split words before you then use Remove Line Breaks to merge the resulting lines into full paragraphs. Doing it in reverse order can cause the line-break tool to merge words that still contain hyphens.