Convert Word to pdf without adding hard returns

When exporting Word to PDF, be sure to export as a "tagged PDF", so you should not have this issue.

I identified the method. Word WITH the "Create Adobe PDF" option from the File Export menu. Using this option to acrobat, you can create the pdf without the equivelent of adding a hard return at the end of every line.

I tried every setting I could find and every type of export from inside Acrobat itseld, and they all cause the hard return at the end of each line.

As part of my work, I highlight. copy and then paste into Notepad. Notepad breaks the text at the end of each physical line. I add a space after the last character and delete the hard return, to produce a correct paragraph. This is then copied and pasted into an program to compare this block of text to what should be a match. Yesterday, I did something in the settings of Acrobat and when I created a pdf from a Word file. The hard returns were gone. I did not have time to work it out yet, but I do not believe it was a fluke.

You mean there is a hard return when you copy two lines of text in one paragraph?

There are no hard (or soft) returns in PDF. The PDF content you create has no formatting applied to it in the sense of what you would do in MS Word. What PDF contains is a series of characters, layed out in a certain way across a page. What you make out of that by looking at it is up to you, and the same thing applies when you try to repurpose the content of the PDF file, but then it's no longer you looking, it's the application that converts from PDF to your target format that needs to interpret the content. 

Let's take a step back: What are you trying to accomplish?