Remove extra spaces
Collapse repeated spaces and tabs while preserving line breaks and readable paragraph spacing.
How to use remove extra spaces
This one fixes spacing and nothing else: runs of spaces and tabs collapse to a single space, line ends are trimmed, and towers of blank lines shrink to one — while every line break you meant keeps its place.
- 1Paste the unevenly spaced text
The usual sources: justified PDFs whose stretched gaps became double spaces, tab-separated exports, and documents where someone aligned things with the space bar. Paste it as it is.
- 2Decide about blank lines
Collapse blank lines, on by default, reduces any run of blank lines to a single one — paragraph separation survives, the vertical sprawl goes. Untick it to preserve intentional vertical spacing exactly.
- 3Clean and confirm the layout
Select Clean text. The line structure on the right matches the left apart from collapsed blank runs; only the horizontal whitespace inside lines has changed.
When this tool is useful
Deliberately narrower than the smart cleaner
The rules are exactly three: within each line, any run of spaces and tabs becomes one space — including the non-breaking and thin spaces web pages paste in, which look identical to ordinary ones; leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed from each line; and, optionally, consecutive blank lines collapse to one. Single line breaks are never touched, so the layout of a list or an address survives. Indentation does not — leading spaces are trimmed like any other run — which makes this a prose tool, not one for code, where indentation is meaning.
Tabs are treated as fat spaces rather than as structure. A tab-separated export pasted here comes out with single spaces between fields, which reads well as prose but flattens the columns — if the tabs are carrying table structure you intend to keep, keep that text away from this tool.
It is the narrow counterpart to the smart cleaner: no hidden-character handling, no punctuation rules, and blank lines are kept (singly) rather than removed. A single non-breaking space between two words is left in place, because it is usually there on purpose — "10 km" should not wrap across a line. Only when it is part of a wider gap does it collapse with the rest.
Remove extra spaces questions
Single line breaks never move. The only vertical change is optional: runs of blank lines collapse to one while Collapse blank lines is on.
Yes. A gap made of non-breaking, thin, or other special spaces from web copy collapses to one ordinary space just like a run of normal spaces. A lone non-breaking space between two words is kept, since it usually exists to stop a line break there; the invisible character remover converts every one if you need that.
Yes. Leading spaces and tabs are trimmed from every line, which is right for prose and wrong for code or verse. Keep indented text away from this tool if the indentation carries meaning.
Each run of tabs becomes a single space, so tabular data flattens into prose spacing. If you need the columns, the tabs are the structure — do not run that text through here.
The smart cleaner additionally strips hidden characters, fixes spacing before punctuation, and removes blank lines entirely. This tool changes horizontal spacing only and keeps one blank line between paragraphs, making it the safer pass when layout matters.