In the end solutions was quite simple really, maybe not the most elegant one but does the job just right and in the end your will end up still with ActiveRecord::Relation, so you can easily paginate your results with will_paginate or kaminari gem.

So, let’s break it down.

First - I was using custom polish dictionary, and I already had a trigger in database that recreated my tsvector column every update/insert. So in that case you can declare PgSearch scope like that:

pg_search_scope :search_full_text,
 :against => :body,
 :using  => { :tsearch =>
              {
                :dictionary       => "polish",
                :tsvector_column  => 'fts',
                :prefix           => true
              }
            }

And basically that works great, except when your try to select ts_highligh with can be painfully slow. So what I did there:

• first I monkey patched pg_search for my application - I didn’t wanted to select all the columns, just few ones. So in pg_search/lib/pg_search/scope_options.rb I customized apply method

• then I just used select from select in a simple manner, take a look at example below

def self.search(search_query, page)
  body = "ts_headline('polish', body, plainto_tsquery('polish','#{search_query}'), 'startsel=''<em class=\"headline\">'' stopsel=</em>, MaxFragments=2, maxwords=15, minwords=5') as body"
  self.select[:id, body].from("(#{self.search_full_text(search_query).paginate(:page => page).to_sql}) as result")
end

As you see I’m selecting id column and my highlighted body from paginated results (using will_paginate here). In the view you can display pagination over search_full_text(search_query).paginate(:page => page). Refactor it as you please. Right now it seems like the best solution I could think of - if you have better idea let me know!