Break lines where you want them.

What it does

A line break is a character like any other, but it is invisible in most views. That makes it easy to add too many, inherit the wrong ones from a PDF, or lose them when a form rejects multi-line input. This tool works in both directions: it can insert breaks at a regular interval, or remove them and put something else in their place.

The operation is deliberately literal. It does not reflow text the way a browser does when you resize a window. It does not know where a sentence “should” wrap. It inserts or removes actual newline characters, which is what most downstream systems actually care about.

Adding breaks

Choose a unit — words, characters, or sentences — and an interval. The tool walks through the text and starts a new line every time the interval is reached. Breaking every five words is useful for a caption card or a teleprompter. Breaking every forty characters is useful for a fixed-width display or an SMS template. Breaking every two sentences can turn a dense paragraph into a more scannable block.

When “keep blank-line paragraph breaks” is on, each paragraph is processed separately and the blank line between paragraphs is retained. Without it, the whole input is treated as one stream, which can flatten a deliberately structured document. If the input has no blank lines, the option makes no visible difference.

Removing breaks

Choose what should replace each break. A space is the right answer for ordinary prose: it turns a hard-wrapped paragraph back into a flowing one without gluing words together. “Nothing” is useful for a break inside a URL, a long identifier, or a word split by a layout. A custom replacement is useful when the lines are really a list and you want a comma or a pipe between them.

“Collapse repeated spaces after joining” cleans up the common result of a line that ended with a space and a next line that began with one. Leave it off when spacing is meaningful, such as in a fixed-width table or a code block. The tool is not a formatter; it does not know which spaces are structural.

Paragraphs vs line breaks

The distinction matters more than it first appears. A paragraph break is usually a blank line: two newline characters with no text between them. A line break is a single newline. When you remove breaks with “keep paragraphs” on, the tool joins the lines inside each paragraph but leaves the blank line between paragraphs alone.

If a document uses a single newline between paragraphs and no blank lines, the tool cannot tell a paragraph boundary from a wrapped line. It will treat both the same way. That is a limitation of plain text, not a bug in the operation. Check the source for blank lines before removing anything.

Examples

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten.

One two three
four five six
seven eight nine
ten.

The final line is short because the words run out. The tool does not pad it or redistribute the text to make every line the same length. If you need balanced lines, that is a different job — usually a typographic one, not a character-count one.

The report was exported from a PDF and wrapped
at the edge of the page, so every line ends
before the sentence does.

This second paragraph should stay separate.

The report was exported from a PDF and wrapped at the edge of the page, so every line ends before the sentence does.

This second paragraph should stay separate.

The single breaks inside each paragraph disappear. The blank line between the two paragraphs survives, so the second idea does not get attached to the first. A hyphenated word would need the Merge Lines tool because the hyphen is not a line-break character.

Limits worth knowing

• Only actual newline characters are changed. A visible break created by CSS, a table cell, or a <br> tag is not a newline character in the copied text. Convert the markup first if that is what you have.
• Lists can be flattened. Removing every break from a bulleted list produces one long line. If the breaks are structural, use a separator instead of a space, or leave the list alone.
• Code and poetry are risky. In code, a newline can end a statement or change the meaning of a comment. In poetry, the line break is the form. Use the original as the source of truth and copy the result only after reading it.
• Paragraph detection is blank-line based. A line containing only spaces is treated as blank for the purpose of keeping paragraphs. A line with a non-breaking space is not necessarily blank, because that character is not ordinary whitespace.
• Sentence mode depends on punctuation. It uses terminal punctuation to find sentence boundaries. Abbreviations and missing punctuation can produce an imperfect split.

Page updated 27 October 2026