Hyphenation at line ends
Narrow columns and justified text force words to break. The hyphen is correct on paper and wrong everywhere the text goes next.
Free · Private · Runs in your browser
PDF hyphen remover — put the words a PDF broke back together
Upload the document, press once. The hyphens that marked line breaks inside words are removed from the extracted text, the words rejoin, and the whole document is ready to copy or download.
Clean a PDF in your browser
Text with whole words
The classic PDF paste: a word arrives with a hyphen welded into its middle, because the printed page happened to break the line there. Typesetters hyphenate to justify margins; PDFs freeze those decisions into the text layer. Across a whole document it multiplies — every justified page can break a dozen words. This page takes the PDF directly and cleans the entire text layer in one pass.
The tool removes the visible hyphen family — the keyboard hyphen (U+002D), the Unicode hyphen (U+2010) and the non-breaking hyphen (U+2011) — from inside words, where a line break put them, and rejoins the word around them. Space-surrounded hyphens, which read as dashes in prose, and compounds like well-known are handled by the same rules the main hyphen remover uses, so nothing that was meant to be there disappears. Em dashes and en dashes pass through untouched.
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. Run it before anything else touches the text: the rejoined words make the soft-hyphen and line-break passes that may follow both simpler.
Everything happens in your browser. The file is read locally, the text is cleaned in memory, and the result is shown on the page — no upload step, no server, no copy retained anywhere. 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.
Why PDFs break words in the first place
Justification wanted a straight margin; you wanted whole words.
Unicode hyphens (U+2010)
Some PDF writers emit the typographic hyphen, which fails validators that expect the ASCII hyphen — inside words that were broken, no less.
Two-column layouts
Reading order sometimes interleaves columns, so the broken words are not even adjacent. Fix the hyphens first; the line break remover helps with the rest.
Related dash tools
PDF pastes rarely stop at one broken character. The rest of the fix lives here.
PDF Dash Remover
All three dash families at once, from the same upload.
PDF Em Dash Remover
The same fix for the long dashes a PDF carries.
PDF En Dash Remover
The same fix for ranges and figure dashes from a PDF.
Soft Hyphen Remover
The invisible hyphens inside PDF words, gone in a click.
Line Break Remover
Join the lines the PDF broke at every printed row.
Extra Spaces Remover
The double spaces a joined paragraph reveals underneath.
Questions
Which characters does this tool remove?
The visible hyphen family: the keyboard hyphen (U+002D), the Unicode hyphen (U+2010) and the non-breaking hyphen (U+2011) — inside words, where a line break put them. Soft hyphens (U+00AD) are invisible and belong to the soft-hyphen remover.
Will it delete the hyphen in well-known?
No. The tool only rejoins words that a line break split — the pattern is a word half, a hyphen, and the other half continuing. Genuine compounds read as one unit on one line and are left alone.
What is the difference between this and the plain hyphen remover?
The hyphen remover applies one blunt rule to every hyphen in pasted text; this page reads the PDF directly and applies the PDF-tuned rules to the whole document. Use the count in the result panel as the diagnostic, and the remover for the blanket pass.
It removed a hyphen but the word is still split — why?
Because the PDF also put a line break where it broke the word. Remove the hyphens here, then run the line break remover; the two artifacts travel together and each tool handles its own.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The file is processed entirely in your browser: pdf.js extracts the text locally, the hyphen engine runs as ordinary page JavaScript, and the cleaned text is written on your device. There is no upload endpoint to send anything to.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
No. A scan is a picture of text with no characters underneath, so there is nothing to extract. Run the pages through OCR first, then clean the resulting text-based PDF.
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.
Ready to clean your PDF?
Drop the file in, press once. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored — the words rejoin and the clean text is yours in seconds.
Clean a PDF now