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PDF dash remover — clean every dash in a PDF, in your browser

Upload the document, pick the dash families, press once. The text comes back cleaned in a text box, ready to copy or download as a .txt file. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Clean a PDF in your browser

Your PDF

The file is processed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

The text tools on this site run on pasted text, but most dash-riddled documents live as PDFs — a report where every aside arrived as —, a thesis whose ranges use the horizontal bar, a manuscript where ChatGPT's punctuation survived the export. Uploading one here closes that gap: drop the PDF in, and the same dash engine that powers the paste tools rewrites the dash families you pick in the extracted text.

The output is text you can use immediately. The cleaned document appears in a text box on the page, with a copy button and a .txt download beside it — paste it into Word, Google Docs or your CMS, or keep the file. Extracting the text layer is what makes this reliable: the same rules run on the same characters every time, with none of the font surgery that makes in-place PDF editing fragile.

Everything happens in your browser. The file is read locally, the text is cleaned in memory, and the result is shown on the page — there is no upload step, no server, and no copy retained anywhere. That is not a policy promise but an architectural fact: the page has no backend to send anything to.

One honest limit: the tool reads the text layer, so it works on text-based PDFs — scanned pages carry their words as pictures, and there is nothing to extract. Password-protected files are refused, and the size limit is 25.0 MB per file.

How it works

Three steps, no account, no upload.

1

Drop in the PDF

Pick a file or drag it onto the page. It is read where it sits — nothing is uploaded, and the file is forgotten the moment you close the tab.

2

Choose what to clean

The document is scanned and each dash family is counted: em dashes, en dashes, hyphens. Untick what should stay, and pick remove or replace — with the character each dash becomes.

3

Download the clean text

One pass cleans every selected dash in the extracted text. The result appears in a text box — copy it, or download it as a .txt file straight from your browser.

What you get out

The document's text, with the dashes swapped out and nothing else changed.

Cleaned text in a box

The whole document appears in a text box on the page, cleaned by the same rules the paste tools use — ready to read, edit or select.

A .txt download

One button writes the cleaned text to a file your computer can open anywhere — no special software, no re-upload.

One-click copy

Prefer the clipboard? Copy the whole cleaned text and paste it straight into your editor or CMS.

Questions

Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The file is processed entirely in your browser: pdf.js extracts the text locally, the dash engine runs as ordinary page JavaScript, and the cleaned PDF is written on your device. There is no upload endpoint to send it to — you can watch the network tab stay silent.
Does the download keep the original layout?
No — the output is cleaned plain text, shown in a text box and downloadable as a .txt file. Extracting the text is what makes the cleanup reliable: every dash is found and rewritten with the same rules, which in-place PDF editing cannot promise. Images, fonts and column layout stay behind in the PDF; the text is what you get.
Which dash types does it remove?
By default all three families, exactly like the text tools: em dashes (including the horizontal bar and multi-em dashes), en dashes (including the figure dash) and hyphens (including Unicode, non-breaking and soft hyphens). Each family is counted before the run, and you can untick any of them.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
No. A scan is a picture of text with no characters underneath, so there is nothing to extract. If the scan reports zero dashes on a document you know is full of them, that is the tell. Run the pages through OCR first, then clean the resulting text-based PDF.
What about password-protected files?
They are refused with a clear message. Remove the protection — or print the document to a new PDF — and the copy will process normally.
How large a file can I clean?
25.0 MB per file. Larger documents are usually fine split in half — PDF readers can extract a page range into a smaller file, and each half cleans independently.
Can I replace dashes instead of deleting them?
Yes. Remove deletes the dash; Replace swaps every selected dash for a character you choose — a hyphen for ranges, a comma for prose, an underscore for forms. Word-like replacements ("and") get a space on either side automatically, so ranges still read naturally.

Ready to clean your PDF?

Drop the file in, tick the dash families, press once. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored — the clean copy is yours in seconds.

Clean a PDF now

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