En realidad en javascript podés hacer esto (funciona en todos los navegadores excepto en chrome):
Código PHP:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Documento sin título</title>
<script type="text/javascript">
/**
*
* Base64 encode / decode
* http://www.webtoolkit.info/
*
**/
var Base64 = {
// private property
_keyStr : "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/=",
// public method for encoding
encode : function (input) {
var output = "";
var chr1, chr2, chr3, enc1, enc2, enc3, enc4;
var i = 0;
input = Base64._utf8_encode(input);
while (i < input.length) {
chr1 = input.charCodeAt(i++);
chr2 = input.charCodeAt(i++);
chr3 = input.charCodeAt(i++);
enc1 = chr1 >> 2;
enc2 = ((chr1 & 3) << 4) | (chr2 >> 4);
enc3 = ((chr2 & 15) << 2) | (chr3 >> 6);
enc4 = chr3 & 63;
if (isNaN(chr2)) {
enc3 = enc4 = 64;
} else if (isNaN(chr3)) {
enc4 = 64;
}
output = output +
this._keyStr.charAt(enc1) + this._keyStr.charAt(enc2) +
this._keyStr.charAt(enc3) + this._keyStr.charAt(enc4);
}
return output;
},
// public method for decoding
decode : function (input) {
var output = "";
var chr1, chr2, chr3;
var enc1, enc2, enc3, enc4;
var i = 0;
input = input.replace(/[^A-Za-z0-9+/=]/g, "");
while (i < input.length) {
enc1 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
enc2 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
enc3 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
enc4 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
chr1 = (enc1 << 2) | (enc2 >> 4);
chr2 = ((enc2 & 15) << 4) | (enc3 >> 2);
chr3 = ((enc3 & 3) << 6) | enc4;
output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr1);
if (enc3 != 64) {
output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr2);
}
if (enc4 != 64) {
output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr3);
}
}
output = Base64._utf8_decode(output);
return output;
},
// private method for UTF-8 encoding
_utf8_encode : function (string) {
string = string.replace(/rn/g,"\n");
var utftext = "";
for (var n = 0; n < string.length; n++) {
var c = string.charCodeAt(n);
if (c < 128) {
utftext += String.fromCharCode(c);
}
else if((c > 127) && (c < 2048)) {
utftext += String.fromCharCode((c >> 6) | 192);
utftext += String.fromCharCode((c & 63) | 128);
}
else {
utftext += String.fromCharCode((c >> 12) | 224);
utftext += String.fromCharCode(((c >> 6) & 63) | 128);
utftext += String.fromCharCode((c & 63) | 128);
}
}
return utftext;
},
// private method for UTF-8 decoding
_utf8_decode : function (utftext) {
var string = "";
var i = 0;
var c = c1 = c2 = 0;
while ( i < utftext.length ) {
c = utftext.charCodeAt(i);
if (c < 128) {
string += String.fromCharCode(c);
i++;
}
else if((c > 191) && (c < 224)) {
c2 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+1);
string += String.fromCharCode(((c & 31) << 6) | (c2 & 63));
i += 2;
}
else {
c2 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+1);
c3 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+2);
string += String.fromCharCode(((c & 15) << 12) | ((c2 & 63) << 6) | (c3 & 63));
i += 3;
}
}
return string;
}
}
function salvar(t){
if(window.ActiveXObject){
var v=window.open('','pp','');
v.document.open();
v.document.write(t+'<scr'+'ipt>document.execCommand("SaveAs",null,"archivo.txt");</scr'+'ipt>');
v.document.close();
}else{
if(typeof btoa=='function')
window.location='data:application/octet-stream;base64,'+btoa(t);
else
window.location='data:application/octet-stream;base64,'+Base64.encode(t);
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" name="form1">
<textarea name="textarea" cols="80" rows="5" id="textarea"></textarea>
<input onclick="salvar(textarea.value)" type="button" name="Submit" value="descargar como txt" id="Submit" />
</form>
<iframe id="pp" name="pp" style="position:absolute; left:-1500px" />
</body>
</html>