Remove Extra Spaces Tool

Text copied out of a PDF is the worst offender. PDFs store glyph positions rather than words, so extraction inserts spaces wherever the layout had a gap — which means mid-word breaks in justified text, doubled spaces between sentences, and line breaks that fall in the middle of a paragraph. The result looks almost right, which is why it so often survives into a published page.

The characters causing trouble are usually the ones you cannot see. Non-breaking spaces render identically to normal spaces but fail exact-match comparisons and refuse to wrap, so they push layouts wider than expected. Tabs from spreadsheet cells, zero-width characters from web copy, and trailing spaces at line ends all behave the same way: invisible on screen, disruptive to anything that processes the text.

Do this first in any editing workflow, because everything downstream inherits the problem. Word counts, sentence splitting, slug generation, deduplication, and diffing all give wrong answers on text with irregular spacing — two strings that look identical will compare as different, and a sentence splitter will merge or split in the wrong places. Cleaning up front costs seconds and removes an entire category of confusing failures later.