Paste Cleaner

What it fixes

Everything that repairs damage is on. Everything that is a matter of taste is off — an em dash is usually there on purpose.

• Remove invisible charactersZero-width spaces, soft hyphens, byte-order marks.
• Normalise odd spacesNon-breaking, thin and full-width spaces become ordinary ones.
• Straighten quotesCurly quotes, guillemets and primes become straight ones.
• Rejoin hyphenated line breaksThe "manage- / ment" split that PDF columns leave behind.
• Collapse repeated spacesTwo or more spaces mid-line become one. Indentation is left alone.
• Trim trailing spacesWhitespace hanging off the end of a line.
• Collapse runs of blank linesThree or more line breaks in a row become one blank line.
• Unwrap mid-sentence line breaksJudgment call: joins a line that clearly continues the one above.
• Turn bullet glyphs into dashesJudgment call: a bullet at the start of a line becomes "- ".
• Flatten dashesJudgment call: em and en dashes become hyphens. Usually intentional.
• Split the ellipsis characterJudgment call: a single … becomes three full stops.