====== Plaintext is not XML ======

PHPTAL intentionally doesn't support plaintext output. 

For plaintext you don't need automatic escaping, strict syntax/structure checks (which are strengths of PHPTAL), but you need precise control of whitespace (which is hard to do in XML). 

For plaintext, you can use standard PHP or Smarty-like as a templating language. Their ignorance of structure and lack of escaping by default, which are troublesome for XML, are exactly what you need for plain text.

===== Using PHPTAL's variables outside PHPTAL templates =====

If you want to reuse variables from PHPTAL object in raw PHP templates, then use:

<code php><?php 
  $ctx = $phptal->getContext(); 
?></code>

<code php><?= $ctx->variable_name ?></code>

You can also access TALES paths outside templates:

<code php><?= phptal_path($ctx, "tales/path/to/variable"); ?></code>

===== Other approaches =====

If you need both [X]HTML and plaintext version of a page, then you can try to convert XHTML to plain text. Here's a quick'n'dirty way:

<code php>
$markup = $phptal->execute();
$markup = preg_replace('/s+/',' ',$markup); // normalize whitespace
$markup = preg_replace('<(p|ul|ol)',"\n\n<\1", $markup); // add newlines
$markup = preg_replace('<(br|li)',"\n<\1", $markup); // add newlines
$text = html_entity_decode(strip_tags($markup),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8')); // remove tags and entities
</code>