About the Text Formatter
Text that has been through a PDF, an email client and a chat window collects damage: runs of spaces, a gap before every comma, missing capitals after a full stop, and paragraphs broken into short ragged lines. This formatter repairs those in one pass. Runs of spaces collapse to one, whitespace before , . ; : ! ? is deleted, a single space is inserted after punctuation that is missing one, and spaces just inside brackets are removed.
Paragraph handling is the part worth choosing deliberately. Reflow lines joins every line of a paragraph into one flowing block, which is what you want after copying from a PDF column. Keep line breaks preserves your layout and only cleans the spacing, which suits addresses, lists and poetry. One sentence per line splits on sentence endings, a format that makes version control diffs readable and is popular for documentation repositories.
Wrap at zero leaves lines as long as they need to be. Set it to 72 or 80 and every line is broken on a space before that column, which is what plain text email and commit message bodies expect. The optional straighten pass converts curly quotes, en dashes, em dashes, ellipsis characters and non breaking spaces into their plain ASCII equivalents, which is the fastest cure for text that looks fine on screen but breaks a CSV import. Paragraph and sentence counts appear in the status line. To strip characters rather than tidy them, use the Text Cleaner, and for word totals open the Word Counter.
How to use
- Paste the text you want tidied into the left pane.
- Pick a Paragraphs mode: reflow for PDF copy, keep for addresses, one sentence per line for docs in Git.
- Set Wrap at to 72 or 80 if the result has to fit a plain text email or a commit message.
- Tick Straighten quotes and dashes when the text is heading into a system that only accepts ASCII.
Common questions
- Will it capitalise names and places?
- No. Only the first letter of each sentence is raised, because a tool that guessed at proper nouns would mangle brand names, code identifiers and abbreviations.
- Why did my bullet list turn into one paragraph?
- Reflow mode joins every line of a block. Switch Paragraphs to "Keep line breaks" so each bullet keeps its own line while the spacing is still cleaned.
- Does wrapping ever break a long word?
- No. Lines are only split at spaces, so a long URL or file path stays intact even if it runs past the wrap column.
- What counts as a paragraph break?
- One or more blank lines. Single line breaks inside a block are treated as soft wrapping and may be joined depending on the mode you pick.