Why does tesseract append ^L to the output

Question

I am using tesseract to OCR some text in images, e.g this one:

I have this version of tesseract on my Ubuntu 20.04:

$ tesseract --version
tesseract 4.1.1
 leptonica-1.79.0
  libgif 5.1.4 : libjpeg 8d (libjpeg-turbo 2.0.3) : libpng 1.6.37 : libtiff 4.1.0 : zlib 1.2.11 : libwebp 0.6.1 : libopenjp2 2.3.1
 Found AVX2
 Found AVX
 Found FMA
 Found SSE
 Found libarchive 3.4.0 zlib/1.2.11 liblzma/5.2.4 bz2lib/1.0.8 liblz4/1.9.2 libzstd/1.4.4

Invoking it as follows:

tesseract example.png output txt

However, when I open the output.txt file in vim, I see ^L at the last line as follows:

What is the meaning of that character? Why it is appended at the last line? Is it possible to get rid of it?

I have looked in the man page of tesseract, but I can't find anything about that.

Answer 1

I assume that tesseract adds a new page (the ASCII "Form Feed") character to the end of the text. You can delete it using:

sed -i 's/^L//' output.txt

To enter the ^L character in the above command, fist type Ctrl+V and then Ctrl+L.

For GNU sed you can simply use the following command also:

sed  -i 's/\x0c//' output.txt

---

As a more straightforward method, you can use the -c option as follows:

tesseract -c page_separator="" example.png output txt

so you will not have any "page separator" in the output file.