docusealco/docuseal · error · Pdfium::PdfiumError

Failed to load text page #{page_index}, pointer is NULL.

Error message

Failed to load text page #{page_index}, pointer is NULL.

What it means

Raised by Page#text when FPDFText_LoadPage returns NULL for the loaded page. check_last_error runs first and raises the error-code variant when PDFium recorded one, so this plain message means the text layer could not be built without a recorded code, typically a content stream pdfium cannot parse. A scanned PDF without OCR is not a failure (char_count of 0 returns an empty string), so this error signals actual structural damage.

Source

Thrown at lib/pdfium.rb:1063

      bitmap_data = buffer_ptr.read_bytes(stride * render_height)

      [bitmap_data, render_width, render_height]
    ensure
      Pdfium.FPDFBitmap_Destroy(bitmap_ptr) if bitmap_ptr && !bitmap_ptr.null?
    end

    def text
      return @text if @text

      ensure_not_closed!

      text_page = Pdfium.FPDFText_LoadPage(page_ptr)

      if text_page.null?
        Pdfium.check_last_error("Failed to load text page #{page_index}")

        raise PdfiumError, "Failed to load text page #{page_index}, pointer is NULL."
      end

      char_count = Pdfium.FPDFText_CountChars(text_page)

      return @text = '' if char_count.zero?

      buffer_char_capacity = char_count + 1

      buffer = FFI::MemoryPointer.new(:uint16, buffer_char_capacity)

      chars_written = Pdfium.FPDFText_GetText(text_page, 0, buffer_char_capacity, buffer)

      if chars_written <= 0
        Pdfium.check_last_error("Failed to extract text from page #{page_index}")

        return @text = ''
      end

View on GitHub (pinned to 004a22c1c8)

Solutions

1. Confirm other pages extract fine to isolate a single bad page, and treat that page as having no text
2. Repair the file externally (qpdf --decrypt or ghostscript re-distill) and retry
3. Rescue per page and continue the job rather than failing the whole document
4. Update libpdfium; text-loading fixes ship in most releases

Example fix

# before
text = doc.pages.map(&:text).join

# after
text = doc.pages.filter_map do |page|
  begin
    page.text
  rescue Pdfium::PdfiumError
    '' # skip unparseable page
  end
end.join

text = begin
  page.text
rescue Pdfium::PdfiumError
  '' # unparseable page: no text rather than failed job
end

When it happens

Trigger: Calling page.text on a page whose content stream is corrupt; documents that only partially loaded; pages damaged by earlier failed edit operations on the same document object.

Common situations: Search/indexing pipelines over user uploads; text extraction from PDFs produced by broken generators; files that survived partial transfers.

Related errors

• Failed to load text page
• Failed to load page #{page_index}, pointer is NULL.
• Failed to create new document
• Failed to load document from file '#{file_path}', pointer is
• Failed to load document from memory, pointer is NULL.

AI-assisted analysis of docusealco/docuseal@004a22c1c8 (2026-08-21). Data as JSON: /api/errors/4618a7c6218b5118. Report an issue: GitHub.