As with templates for HTML documents, templates for plain text documents contain no XSL-FO mark-up and there is no rendering step. The templates comprise plain text with embedded XSLT elements to insert values from the XML document in the appropriate locations.
Again, XML elements in the output document are stripped. As XML and XSL generally do not preserve white-space, use of the <text> element around white-space that is to be preserved is advised (for example, line breaks, indentation, etc.).