KLARTEXT GUIDE

How to convert a bullet list into a paragraph

In KlarText, put the cursor in the list and choose Edit ▸ Join List as Prose. Each item loses its bullet, gains a capital letter and a full stop, and the whole list becomes one paragraph.

You drafted something as a list because lists are easy to think in. Now it has to go into a report, an email or a paragraph of prose, and bullet points are not appropriate:

- reviewed the mooring lines
- replaced the port fender
- topped up the water tank

Turning that into a sentence by hand means deleting three hyphens, capitalising three words, adding three full stops, and joining three lines. For three items it is annoying. For twenty it is a chore that invites mistakes.

The Terminal way

There is no neat one-liner for this, which is part of the point. Stripping the markers is easy enough:

sed -E 's/^[[:space:]]*([-*•]|[0-9]+[.)])[[:space:]]+//' list.txt | tr '\n' ' '

But that leaves you with lowercase fragments run together without punctuation — reviewed the mooring lines replaced the port fender topped up the water tank. The capitalisation and the sentence-ending full stops are the actual work, and sed is a poor tool for them.

The KlarText way

Put the cursor anywhere in the list — you do not have to select it — and choose:

Edit ▸ Join List as Prose

The result:

Reviewed the mooring lines. Replaced the port fender. Topped up the water tank.

Each item becomes a sentence: the marker is stripped, the first letter is capitalised, and a full stop is added if the item did not already end in ., !, ? or :. The sentences are joined with a single space into one paragraph.

What it handles

The common markers. A hyphen, an asterisk or a bullet followed by a space (- , * , • ), and numbered items in the 1. form, are recognised and stripped. Anything else — 2), say — is treated as ordinary text and stays in the sentence, so tidy those markers first if your list uses them.

Indented continuation lines. If an item runs over several lines with the continuation indented, those lines are folded into the same sentence rather than becoming sentences of their own.

Items that are already sentences. An item ending in a full stop or a question mark is left with its punctuation as it stands — you do not get a doubled full stop.

Selection or block. With text selected, exactly that selection is converted. With nothing selected, KlarText finds the extent of the list around your cursor and converts that, leaving the surrounding prose alone.

It is one undo step. If the result is not what you wanted, ⌘Z restores the list.

If your problem is the opposite — prose that arrived broken across lines and needs rejoining — that is Paste and Reflow. See how to reflow hard-wrapped text.

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