Never clean imported text blindly
Imported documents often carry hidden formatting problems: broken paragraph wraps, inconsistent scene breaks, repeated whitespace, smart quote drift, copied headers, and source artifacts from PDF or document conversion.
The safest cleanup workflow is preview-first. A cleanup rule should show what it will change, where the match occurs, and enough context above and below the line to decide whether the edit is safe.
Use find and replace for exact wording problems
Find and replace is best for repeated terms, spelling variants, duplicated phrases, and naming consistency. Match case and whole word controls matter because changing a fragment inside a larger word can introduce errors that are harder to spot than the original problem.
Awtter uses preview modals and apply confirmation so a writer can review matches before the draft changes. Saved presets make recurring cleanup rules reusable across chapters and projects.
Use paragraph cleanup for repeated formatting issues
Paragraph cleanup is for structural patterns rather than one phrase. Examples include trimming blank lines, normalizing paragraph spacing, fixing cut-off lines, or removing repeated source headers that appear between paragraphs.
The key is to keep cleanup rules small. A rule that does one thing clearly is easier to preview, test, save, and trust than a rule that tries to rewrite a whole chapter at once.
Use block cleanup when context changes the decision
Some text should only be changed when a whole block matches a pattern. Block cleanup is useful for front matter imports, pasted notes, repeated boilerplate, or OCR fragments where a single line is not enough context.
Line capture controls above and below the match help writers inspect the surrounding material before applying changes. That small extra context is often the difference between a clean document and an accidental rewrite.