Honestly PDFs are perfect.

PDF’s for stories work perfectly

Only thing to consider is that FA will automatically display the contents in the post if it's .txt, which you could argue makes the story more easily accessible for those who don't want to click to download. But then, as you know, any formatting/typeface changes/custom spacing goes completely out the window.

What I typically do as a happy medium is upload as .PDF, and then also make a .txt variant that I copy+paste at the bottom of the post's description. Depending on the length, the description's character limit may truncate the story, but that's okay by me - as someone could read enough to decide whether they want to download the PDF to get the whole thing.

tl;dr: FA is bad at handling stories or other written works 😮‍💨

Honestly, This. ^

I've always found stories in description boxes on this site really difficult to read, but I'm willing to accept that my experiences are not universal here.

Oh, they are. I don't think anyone is willing to argue that plaintext stories are formatted better. I think it's more an ease-of-access thing, as instead of having to download and view a file, it's just right there. Obviously the reason for not wanting to download the PDF is going to vary, from someone not wanting smut on their device that they could forget to delete/remove, to it just being a "whole thing" to have a whole different program or tab open to read something - and everything in-between.

I personally enjoy and read the PDF files, but I've heard enough folks give these or other reasons to where I'm fine taking the time to do that 'happy medium' I talked about. Those who like the PDF can just download it as usual, and the txt enjoyers can read as well (or at least enough to warrant downloading the whole thing if it gets truncated).

Good points! It's probably also worth noting that my stories tend to be on the longer side, and I don't know what the character limit in a description box is. ^^;

You and me both. Maybe someday the technology will be there that'll tell us when we're at or near the max. Or anything at all. Wishful thinking, though, I suppose...

This ^

PDFs work just fine in my opinion. .txt does allow for the story to be displayed in the post, but maybe it's just my system or something (I'm not too familiar with the different forms), but .txt doesn't save as a file for me, it just opens up another tab with all the text, so I find PDFs to be much better for saving stories. There's also .docx and .rtf, but they're not that much different from just using PDF.

Honestly the way you do things right now works for me.

PDFs or txt for the one side preview are awesome :)

.doc files and the like are the lesser reading experience.