Copy Text From a PDF Without Line Breaks

The Short Answer

A PDF stores text as lines placed on a page. It usually has no idea where a paragraph starts or ends. So when you copy, you get a line break at the end of every line, and Word or your email turns each one into a new paragraph.

The fix is to join the lines back into paragraphs before you paste. Paste the text into a line-break remover, check the result, and copy it again.

Step by Step

1. In the PDF, select the text and copy it (Ctrl+C on Windows, ⌘C on a Mac).
2. Open the Text Unwrapper and paste into the top box. The clean text appears below straight away.
3. Read the result. If two paragraphs were joined, put a blank line between them in the top box. If one paragraph was split, untick the option that starts a new paragraph after a short line.
4. Click Copy.
5. Paste into your document. In Word, click the Paste Options button that appears and choose Keep Text Only to drop the PDF's fonts. In Google Docs, use Edit → Paste without formatting (Ctrl+Shift+V).

Here is a real example, run through the tool with its default settings:

Copied from the PDF

The committee reviewed the proposal in  detail and found that the
budget estimates were reasonable, although the timeline for the
second phase seemed optimistic. Members agreed that the mean-
ing of "completion" should be defined before work begins, and
that a well-
known contractor should be consulted.

After unwrapping

The committee reviewed the proposal in detail and found that the budget estimates were reasonable, although the timeline for the second phase seemed optimistic. Members agreed that the meaning of "completion" should be defined before work begins, and that a well-known contractor should be consulted.

"mean- ing" became "meaning", but "well- known" kept its hyphen, and the double space was collapsed.

Other Ways to Do It

• Open the PDF in Word. In Word, use File → Open and pick the PDF. Word converts it into an editable document, so you don't copy line by line at all. Microsoft says this works best with PDFs that are mostly text, and that lines and pages may break in different places than in the original.
• Find and Replace in Word. In Word's Find and Replace, the Special menu lets you search for a Paragraph Mark (^p). Replacing every one with a space removes the breaks, but it also removes your real paragraph breaks, so you have to add those back by hand.
• Google Docs. Opening a PDF with Google Docs (right-click it in Google Drive → Open with → Google Docs) converts it to text, but Google's own help page says line breaks are likely to be kept, so it doesn't solve this problem. It also only works for files of 2 MB or smaller.

Things That Trip People Up

• Hyphenated words. A word split across two lines comes out as "mean- ing". The unwrapper joins it when the next part starts with a lowercase letter, and keeps the hyphen for compounds like well-known or state-of-the-art.
• Page numbers and headers. If your selection crosses a page, the page number, running header or footer can get copied too, right in the middle of a sentence. Delete them before or after unwrapping.
• Two-column layouts. Selecting across columns can mix lines from both. Copy one column at a time.
• Symbols or gibberish instead of text. That isn't a line-break problem. Usually the PDF's fonts don't map back to real letters, so copying gives the wrong characters. You need text recognition (OCR) for that file.
• Lists. Bullet points and numbered items stay on their own lines, and wrapped items are joined back into one line each.

Platform Notes

Windows and Mac: whichever viewer you copy from (a browser, Adobe Acrobat Reader or Preview), if the pasted text has a break at the end of every line, the same fix applies.

Email: text from older plain-text emails and mailing lists often has the same problem, because the email standard (RFC 5322) recommends lines of no more than 78 characters, so plain-text mail is often wrapped. The unwrapper treats it the same way.

Phone: the Text Unwrapper works in the browser on an iPhone or Android phone. Paste, tap Copy, and paste into your notes or email.