PasteFix

You copy three paragraphs from a PDF journal article and paste them into your notes: every line ends mid-sentence, words are split like “under-” and “stand,” and there are page numbers and running headers scattered through. Paste the mess into PasteFix, leave the defaults on, and hit clean. Wrapped lines rejoin into real paragraphs, hyphenated words fuse back together (“understand”), and the stray “Journal of Examples 47” header lines can be stripped.

What took five minutes of manual joining now takes five seconds, and the cleaned text is ready to quote or summarize. For a 20-page chapter, clean it in two or three chunks — smaller pastes let you eyeball each result and catch the rare spot where a real line break (like a list item) should have been kept.

PasteFix works on the text you paste — it cannot reach back into the PDF for layout it never received. Tables and multi-column layouts often paste as jumbled reading order, and no text cleaner can reliably reconstruct which cell belonged where; those need manual fixing.

The hyphenation remover is conservative by design: it only joins a hyphen at a line break when the fused word looks like a real word. Unusual proper nouns or technical terms may stay split — a quick scan of the output catches them. And if your PDF’s text layer is scanned images rather than real text, copy-paste gives you nothing to clean; that needs OCR first.