Q: What is CRLF and why does it cause problems?

CRLF (Carriage Return + Line Feed, \r\n) is the Windows line ending standard. Unix/macOS use LF (\n) only. Mixed line endings cause issues in git diffs, shell scripts, and tools that expect a single style. The normaliser converts all line endings to LF.

Question 1

What is CRLF and why does it cause problems?

Accepted Answer

CRLF (Carriage Return + Line Feed, 
) is the Windows line ending standard. Unix/macOS use LF (
) only. Mixed line endings cause issues in git diffs, shell scripts, and tools that expect a single style. The normaliser converts all line endings to LF.

Question 2

Why does pasted text from PDFs have extra spaces?

Accepted Answer

PDF text extraction often inserts spaces between characters, words, or columns because it reconstructs text from glyph positions rather than character streams. The Whitespace Normaliser collapses multiple consecutive spaces to one, cleaning up these artefacts.

Question 3

Will this remove intentional indentation?

Accepted Answer

It depends on the mode. 'Trim trailing whitespace' removes spaces and tabs at the end of each line only. 'Collapse multiple spaces' collapses runs of spaces inside lines. Indentation at the start of a line is preserved unless you enable 'Trim leading whitespace'.

Question 4

Is my text safe here?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Normalisation runs in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server.

Whitespace Normalizer

Whitespace normalisation modes

Whitespace Normalizer

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Whitespace normalisation modes