Clean CV text for application forms

Many application forms have a box that asks you to paste your CV. Text copied from Word, a PDF or a design tool often arrives with curly quotes, odd bullet characters, non-breaking spaces and invisible characters that show up as boxes or question marks. Paste it here and get a plain-text version that behaves in any text box. Nothing is uploaded: it runs in your browser.

What it changes

• Curly quotes and apostrophes become straight ones (“like this” becomes "like this").
• Long dashes (en and em dashes, minus signs) become a plain hyphen, which keeps ranges such as 2019-2022 readable in forms that cannot show other characters.
• Bullet characters (the round, square, arrow and tick bullets, and a star followed by a space) at the start of a line become "- ". Lines that start with Markdown bold or italics, such as **Title**, are left alone.
• Non-breaking and unusual spaces and tabs become ordinary spaces, and zero-width spaces, word joiners, byte-order marks and soft hyphens are removed. The zero-width joiner and non-joiner are kept, because words in Persian, Hindi and other scripts, and emoji such as the woman technologist, need them.
• Trailing spaces are trimmed, and runs of more than one blank line collapse to one.
• The ellipsis character becomes three full stops, and the ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi and ffl (common in PDF copies) become plain letters.

What it does not change

Your words, line order and capital letters stay exactly as you wrote them. Accented letters such as e with an acute accent, and names in other alphabets, are left alone, because stripping them would change your name or your employers' names. If a particular form cannot take them, edit those by hand. The tool also cannot fix a PDF whose text comes out in the wrong order: check that first by selecting all in the PDF and pasting into a plain text editor.

Checklist before you paste into a form

1. Paste into a plain text editor first. If it looks wrong there, it will look wrong in the form.
2. Keep the same headings as your PDF (Summary, Experience, Education, Skills). Standard names are easiest for people and software to find.
3. Write dates in one style throughout.
4. After pasting into the form, look at its preview if it has one, and re-check line breaks.
5. Keep the cleaned text as a file, so you only do this once per version of your CV.

If you build your CV as a web page and print it to PDF, CV Sheets includes a ready-made plain-text and Markdown version of every template alongside the HTML files, in the same order as the printed CV, ready for you to replace with your own words. There is a free guide to saving an HTML CV as a PDF and a print checker too. This tool cleans characters; it makes no claim about how any applicant tracking system will treat your CV.