Accessing content of textarea in Drupal-7-Theme-Form

in my custom theme-settings.php (zen-subtheme) i put following code to get a new textarea with textformat in my theme-settings:

  <?php
    function paper_form_system_theme_settings_alter(&$form, &$form_state)  {
        $form['paper_data'] = array(
        '#type' => 'text_format',
        '#title' => 'Put Text in here:',
        '#rows' => 5,
        '#resizable' => FALSE,
        '#default_value' => 'xyz..',
        '#format' => 'full_html'
      );
    }

the form is working perfektly, but when i want to access the variable by writing

<?php
$pdata = theme_get_setting('paper_data');
echo $pdata;
?>

in my page.tpl.php, the content of the variable is not rendered - instead the word "Array" is printed ... What's wrong and why? (If i use 'textarea' as type instead of 'text_format', all is rendered well.)

You will understand when you use something like the Devel module's dpm() function to check the variable rather than echo(). Coding Drupal without the Devel module is, IMHO, folly.

The issue very likely stems from your use of the text_format type. As you can see, it saves both the textarea value as well as an associated text format. When this is used Drupal returns the data in structured form which varies depending on the type of format.

dpm() is your friend :)