will pico or nano fix this?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Tim here.  You could try running it through the "fmt" utility to
reformat paragraphs, assuming each paragraph has a blank line between
it.  To reformat it to 80-columns wide, you could do

 $ fmt -80 < short_lines.txt > nice_and_wide.txt

My version here has a maximum allowed width of 2500 apparently, in
case you want to try and make them as long as possible.

If that doesn't do what you want, you'd have to provide a sample
excerpt of the file (or redacted text in a similar format, especially
when it comes to line-breaks and paragraph breaks) to test against.
But hopefully that above invocation solves it for you

-tim

On July  7, 2017, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> Hi All,
> We have both editors here at shellworld.  Here is the situation.
> using pdftotext I converted a large file.  the resulting text
> though has very very  short lines with hrt, return keys at the end
> of them. As if the file was intended to be read in a very small
> space. I repaired a file like this once, but cannot remember how.
> Any tips?