diff --git a/gantry-requirements.txt b/gantry-requirements.txt
index de5f63c..ba8967b 100644
--- a/gantry-requirements.txt
+++ b/gantry-requirements.txt
@@ -33,3 +33,4 @@ omegaconf
 s3fs
 transformers>=4.45.1
 bitsandbytes
+ftfy
diff --git a/pdelfin/prompts/anchor.py b/pdelfin/prompts/anchor.py
index 510fbe2..f0dbe68 100644
--- a/pdelfin/prompts/anchor.py
+++ b/pdelfin/prompts/anchor.py
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@
 import subprocess
 import sys
 import json
+import ftfy
 from dataclasses import dataclass
 from typing import Literal, List
 
@@ -163,6 +164,8 @@ def _linearize_pdf_report(report: PageReport) -> str:
             if len(element.text.strip()) == 0:
                 continue
 
-            result += f"[{element.x:.0f}x{element.y:.0f}]{element.text}"
+            # Need to use ftfy to fix text, because occasionally there are invalid surrogate pairs and other UTF issues that cause
+            # pyarrow to fail to load the json later
+            result += f"[{element.x:.0f}x{element.y:.0f}]{ftfy.fix_text(element.text)}"
 
     return result
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 7ab29ac..23ffcc4 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -26,6 +26,7 @@ dependencies = [
   "pypdfium2",
   "lingua-language-detector",
   "Pillow",
+  "ftfy"
 ]
 license = {file = "LICENSE"}
 
diff --git a/tests/gnarly_pdfs/badlines.pdf b/tests/gnarly_pdfs/badlines.pdf
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7e9ea57
Binary files /dev/null and b/tests/gnarly_pdfs/badlines.pdf differ
diff --git a/tests/test_anchor.py b/tests/test_anchor.py
index 810eb54..4d660a2 100644
--- a/tests/test_anchor.py
+++ b/tests/test_anchor.py
@@ -1,11 +1,13 @@
 import unittest
 import os
 import json
+import io
 
 from pypdf import PdfReader
 
 from pdelfin.prompts.anchor import _pdf_report, _linearize_pdf_report, get_anchor_text
 
+
 class AnchorTest(unittest.TestCase):
     def testExtractText(self):
         local_pdf_path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "gnarly_pdfs", "some_ocr1.pdf")
@@ -48,6 +50,24 @@ class AnchorTest(unittest.TestCase):
 
         print(get_anchor_text(local_pdf_path, 1, pdf_engine="pdfreport"))
 
+    def testBadUTFSurrogatePairsGeneration(self):
+        local_pdf_path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "gnarly_pdfs", "badlines.pdf")
+
+        anchor_text = get_anchor_text(local_pdf_path, 4, pdf_engine="pdfreport")
+
+        jsondata = json.dumps({
+            "text": anchor_text
+        })
+
+        import pyarrow as pa
+        import pyarrow.json as paj
+        import pyarrow.compute as pc
+
+        buffer = io.BytesIO(jsondata.encode('utf-8'))
+        paj.read_json(buffer, read_options=paj.ReadOptions(use_threads=False, block_size=len(jsondata)))
+
+
+
 class BuildSilverTest(unittest.TestCase):
     def testSmallPage(self):
         local_pdf_path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "gnarly_pdfs", "small_page_size.pdf")