Thanks Martin and Andrew - these are both helpful suggestions. As it turned out in my case, I was able to output text while declaring it to be xml: I didn't think this would work, but apparently at least Saxon will allow you to output an xml document that contains only text: no elements, which is just what I needed.

If you use disable-output-escaping="yes" and omit-xml-declaration="yes" (and
don't output any elements) then yes, the XML output method becomes very
close to the text output method. But it seems clearer to use method="text",
and there is nothing that stops you using different output methods for
different result documents. And relying on disable-output-escaping seems
very error prone - the first time you encounter data containing "<" or "&",
you're going to find that you forgot to put d-o-e on the relevant
xsl:value-of instruction.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay