Use the free Normalize Whitespace below: your data never leaves your browser — all work happens on your device, and nothing is uploaded to any server.
How whitespace gets messy
Whitespace is everything you cannot see between words: spaces, tabs and line breaks. It gets messy whenever text moves between systems. A document copied from a PDF arrives with double spaces and broken lines. A file edited on both Windows and Mac mixes line endings. A table pasted from a spreadsheet brings tabs where spaces belong. A draft edited in a hurry collects trailing spaces at the ends of lines and blank lines between paragraphs.
Messy whitespace looks sloppy, but it also causes practical trouble. Double spaces throw off word counts and text comparisons. Mixed line endings confuse some tools. Trailing spaces create noisy differences in version control. Extra blank lines make a document longer than it needs to be.
How this tool works
Paste your text and choose the fixes you want. Collapse multiple spaces turns every run of spaces into a single space. Convert tabs to spaces replaces each tab with four spaces, so indentation survives in systems that do not handle tabs well. Trim line edges removes spaces at the start and end of every line. Remove empty lines deletes lines that contain nothing. Normalize line endings converts Windows and old Mac line breaks to the standard Unix style.
Press Normalize and the cleaned text appears, together with the character count before and after. Comparing the two counts shows how much clutter was removed. All options are on except removing empty lines, because blank lines between paragraphs are often intentional. Turn that option on when you want fully compact text.
When to use each option
For text copied from a PDF, turn everything on: PDFs are the worst source of double spaces and broken lines. For code or indented text, be careful with trimming and collapsing, because leading spaces may be meaningful indentation. In that case, use only line-ending normalization and tab conversion.
For a document you are about to publish, collapsing spaces and trimming line edges gives a tidy result without changing the words. For data you are about to compare or import, normalize everything, including empty lines, so that two versions of the same content compare cleanly.
What it does not change
This tool never changes your words, their order or their spelling. It only changes the invisible characters between them. Punctuation is untouched, and single spaces between words stay single spaces. If your text has no whitespace problems, the output will be identical to the input, and the character counts will confirm it.
It also never uploads your text. Everything runs in your browser, so you can normalize private drafts, work documents and personal notes without worrying about where the text goes.
Common uses
Writers normalize text after pasting from PDFs, web pages and chat apps. Developers normalize files before committing them, so that diffs show real changes instead of whitespace noise. Data workers normalize text before importing it into spreadsheets and databases, where extra spaces cause failed matches and duplicate rows.
Students normalize essays assembled from notes written in different apps. Anyone who has ever pasted text and watched the formatting fall apart knows the feeling, and this tool fixes the invisible half of that problem in one click.
Tips
Normalize a copy when the original formatting matters, for example in poetry or code where spacing is part of the meaning. For everyday prose, normalizing the original is safe.
If you normalize regularly, check which option you actually need each time rather than leaving all of them on. A light pass fixes most mess, and a heavy pass is for text that came from a hostile source like a PDF or a mixed-platform file. The before and after counts tell you whether the pass did anything at all.