How to Clean Up Line Breaks in Copied PDF Text While Keeping Paragraphs

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Copying text from a PDF often introduces unwanted hard line breaks, turning continuous paragraphs into fragmented lines of text. Simply removing all line breaks or whitespace is a flawed fix, as it destroys paragraph boundaries, list formatting, and structured content. A more reliable approach involves first protecting blank-line paragraph boundaries using a placeholder, then joining single newlines with spaces, and finally restoring the paragraph breaks. This logic can be implemented in both JavaScript and Python using a short regex-based function. The method is a practical heuristic suited for prose-heavy PDFs, though it may not handle complex layouts like tables or multi-column text perfectly.

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