Hard-wrapped line breaks
The paragraph runs on, then a break lands mid-sentence. The text was wrapped for a fixed width when it was created, and the breaks were stored as real line breaks rather than as visual wrapping.
What you are seeing
Text copied from a PDF, an email body or a terminal arrives like this:
The fix is to paste the text into a plain-text box first, then
strip the single breaks and keep the blank-line gaps.
Every line ends where the original page ended, so the destination app treats each one as a paragraph — or, in Markdown, as the end of a hard break.
Why it happens
PDFs in particular store a newline per rendered line, because the format describes positions on a page rather than sentences. Copying gives you those newlines. Nothing is corrupted; the structure is simply wrong for a text editor.
Fix it by hand
- Paste into a plain-text box — a bare
<textarea>, your editor's "paste as plain text" command, or a terminal. - Join the lines that belong to one paragraph, leaving one space where the break was.
- Keep a blank line between paragraphs, otherwise they merge into one.
- Delete a trailing hyphen only when it split a word
(
consider-+ation), not when the hyphen is part of the word.
Fix it with the extension
- Open Micro-Formatter, paste the text, and press Reflow / Clean pasted text.
- Press Copy to Clipboard, or Replace in Page if the field you selected accepts writes.
It joins wrapped lines with a single space so word boundaries hold, rejoins a word split by a trailing hyphen, keeps each list item on its own line, and preserves the blank-line paragraph gaps. Repeated spaces and tabs collapse to one space.
What it will not do
It cannot tell a wrapped line from a deliberate one. Poetry, addresses and code blocks are lines you meant to keep — check those before copying the result. If the text also carries hidden characters, run Strip formatting as well; reflow leaves them alone.