How to humanize text from a PDF

Why PDF text pastes badly

A PDF is built for printing. It records where each line sits on the page, not where a paragraph starts and ends. Copy a passage and you get:

• a hard line break at the end of every printed line;
• words split across lines with a hyphen, such as "resi-" and "dents";
• the page's header, footer and page number dropped into the middle of a sentence;
• in two-column layouts, lines from both columns mixed together.

A humanizer reads every one of those breaks as the end of a thought, so it's worth fixing them before you send anything. In a two-column PDF, select and copy one column at a time so the lines never mix.

Clean it up in three steps

1. Delete the page furniture. Remove headers, footers, page numbers and figure captions that landed mid-sentence.
2. Join the broken lines. Delete the break at the end of each line inside a paragraph. Keep one empty line between paragraphs.
3. Mend split words. Put hyphenated words back together ("resi-dents" becomes "residents"), but keep real hyphens such as "two-column".

In Word, Find and Replace joins the lines for you

For more than a page, let Word do step 2. Paste the text into a blank document and open Replace with Ctrl + H (Home > Editing > Replace). Paragraph marks come from the Special menu, and Word puts their code, ^p, in the box for you. Then run four passes:

1. Find ^p^p, replace with @@. Parks the real paragraph breaks (an empty line) under a marker.
2. Find ^p, replace with a single space. Joins every broken line inside a paragraph.
3. Find @@, replace with ^p. Puts the real paragraph breaks back.
4. Find - followed by a space, replace with nothing, one at a time. Mends split words such as "resi- dents". Use Find Next and Replace, so real phrases like "two- and three-page" keep their hyphen.

Do the passes in that order. The recipe relies on an empty line between paragraphs, so if your paste has none, press Enter once at each paragraph break before you start. Any marker works in place of @@, as long as it never appears in the text itself.

Example: before and after cleanup

A short passage from a made-up energy report, as it pastes straight out of a PDF and after the three steps. Each ↵ marks a hard line break:

The header "Northside Energy Report Page 4" is gone, "resi-dents" is one word again, and the two paragraphs are real paragraphs. The cleaned version is 35 words, comfortably inside one free run.

Faster for long PDFs: open it in Word or Docs

For a long PDF, skip copying altogether: open the PDF in Word or Google Docs, which turn it into an editable document, and copy sections from that instead.

• Word (desktop, Microsoft 365 or Word 2016 and later): open the PDF from Word as you would any file. Word makes a copy, converts it to a Word document and tries to match the original layout. The PDF itself stays as it was.
• Google Docs: in Google Drive on a computer, right-click the PDF and choose Open with > Google Docs. Drive saves a converted copy as a new document.

Once the PDF is a document, work through it the way you would any long file. In Docs, keep the converted copy as your original and use Compare documents in Google Docs to check every change at the end.

Where to do the cleanup

• Laptop or Chromebook: paste the text into a blank Google Doc or Word document first. It's easier to join lines there than in a small box, and you keep a copy.
• Phone: paste into your notes app, put the cursor at the start of each broken line and tap delete once. For more than a page, wait until you're at a computer. Pages you photographed rather than downloaded need text recognition first; the steps for photographed pages on a phone cover iPhone and Android.
• Directly in the box: fine for a paragraph or two. The box on this site is a normal text field, so you can edit in it before you continue.

Scanned PDFs need text recognition first

If you can't highlight words in the PDF, it's an image of a page. Google Drive can turn it into editable text:

1. Open Google Drive in a browser on your computer.
2. Right-click the PDF.
3. Choose Open with, then Google Docs.

Then humanize section by section

Humaniser's free plan takes up to 200 words per run, which is roughly two or three paragraphs of a report. Copy one cleaned section, paste it here, continue in Humaniser, and paste the result into your working document before you start the next one.

If the PDF becomes a Word file along the way, see how to paste back with Keep Text Only in Word and track the changes. For bold, links and lists, see which formatting makes it through. Or go straight to the free tool.