Thank you. Your response helped me figure out why pgp_pub_decrypt wasn't working for data that was encrypted outside of pgcrypto. The marker you mention must be added by pgp_pub_encrypt? Perhaps it's worth mentioning in the documentation that pgp_pub_decrypt is only intended be used on data encrypted with pgp_pub_encrypt since it's unlikely that a user is going to add that marker themselves.
> I believe the first argument should be of type 'text'. Especially > considering the paragraph that follows discusses how passing in bytea is > disallowed.
No, that's how the function is declared. Maybe the following para isn't clear enough. What it's talking about is that the encrypted message has to contain a marker saying it was originally text.