Is there a way to output text entered into the rich text field on advanced PDF templates? Right now it renders with the <br> tags. If not, is there a way to get just the text content from a rich text field without the markup?

You can try the replace functionality with some regex. Add the r flag at the end to tell freemarker you are using a regular expression.

${xxxxxx?replace('<[^>]+>','','r')}

Yeah I was hoping to avoid regex as the results are not reliable but that may be the only way.