[Solved] How to clear all formatting?

[pdun459]

I copied the text from a PDF and pasted it to a new Writer document so I could format it, but if I highlight a paragraph and try to Justify the alignment it doesn't work unless I manually remove all the line breaks. Does anyone know if you can automatically remove them all at once with Writer? Does it depend on how it was originally created? It's probably simple but I can't figure it out.

Thanks!

[Villeroy]

When you have to clear spaces and line feeds this has nothing to do with formatting. Spaces and line feeds are content. So you have to edit the document. Find&Replace can do magic if you learn a little bit about regular expressions.
For instance
^[:space:]+
selects all consecutive space at the beginning of a line.

[Hagar Delest]

See also that interesting thread, there is a smart macro inside: [Solved] Removing Paragraph per line of text.

Thanks to add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

[pdun459]

Thanks, appreciate the info.

Using Find & Replace with $ worked but I'm surprised Writer doesn't have a Clear Formatting feature similar to Word.

[Villeroy]

Of course you can reset all formatting. Format>Default formatting removes all hard formatting attributes, leaving the formatting of the underlying styles. Then you can use the stylist to reset the styles to some wanted default style (all content has to be shown somehow).
I have no idea what Word does and what not. I ignore that program since many years (and rarely use Writer because it is a similar mess).

Btw: My operating system comes with a whole stack of PDF conversion tools.
pdftoabw pdftohtml pdftoppm pdftops pdftotext
pdf2dsc pdf2ps

[Zizi64]

but I'm surprised Writer doesn't have a Clear Formatting feature similar to Word.

Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice has such function.
You can reset all of direct format properties by the 'Ctrl-A, Ctrl-M' (Select all, Format - Clear Direct Formatting), and you can reset all of the applied paragraph styles to a base style. The base paragraph style of the AOO is the 'Default' paragraph style, but the base paragraph style of the LibreOffice is the 'Text body' style.

The function is available from the Style drop down list: