Resume Formatter
Paste in resume text copied from a PDF or old Word file — or upload the file directly — and get it back with stray invisible characters, smart quotes, inconsistent bullet symbols, and doubled-up spacing cleaned up. Nothing is saved; this just cleans the text.
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Clean Text
Strip stray characters, smart quotes, doubled spacing.
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Consistent Bullets
Normalize inconsistent bullet symbols.
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Nothing Saved
Just cleans the text you paste in.
Why copy-pasted text looks off
PDFs and old Word documents often carry invisible formatting artifacts — non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters, curly "smart" quotes — that look fine in the original but turn into odd spacing or mismatched characters once pasted somewhere else. This tool strips those out and standardizes bullets and spacing at the same time.
Ready to build with it?
Once your text is clean, paste it into the resume builder, or if you have a PDF/DOCX file, the Resume Import tool will parse it directly into an editable resume.
A worked example
Text copied out of a two-column PDF resume often comes through with a non-breaking space where a normal space should be, and dashes rendered as an em dash ("—") instead of a plain hyphen. It looks fine in the box you pasted it into, but paste that same text into a form field with strict validation and it can get silently rejected or garbled. Running it through here first strips the invisible characters and normalizes the punctuation, so what you paste next behaves the way it looks.
What this doesn't fix
This tool cleans up characters and spacing — it doesn't rewrite content, fix grammar, or restructure sections. If your bullet points need stronger verbs or a summary needs rewriting, that's a separate pass; the Action Verbs Library and Resume Checker cover that side of things.
FAQ
Will this change the actual wording of my resume?
No — it only touches characters, punctuation, bullet symbols, and spacing. Every word you typed stays exactly as you typed it.
Can I upload a file instead of pasting text?
Yes — PDF, DOCX, and TXT are all supported. It extracts the text the same way Resume Import does and cleans it from there.
Is anything saved when I use this tool?
No — the text is processed and returned to you in the browser; nothing is stored.
My bullets use different symbols (dashes, asterisks) — will they all end up matching?
Yes — recognized bullet styles at the start of a line, including dashes and asterisks and several bullet glyphs, are all standardized to a single "•" style so the list reads consistently.
What are the "stray characters" it says it removed?
Mostly invisible formatting leftovers from PDFs or old Word files — things like zero-width spaces, byte-order marks, and non-breaking spaces — that don't show up visually but can cause odd spacing or copy-paste issues elsewhere.