Plain text, honestly. I've never been much of a fan of the fancy formatting tricks, and TXT lets you read the story on-site without having to download the file. But if I had to choose one of those two, I think I'd go with the doc.

Unfortunately plain text won't jive well for my next story (soon to be posted). Your input is noted!

.doc is works better with my iPhone. So I'd go with that.

Really now? I was under the impression that .pdf was better for phones, but maybe I need to rethink that.

Plain text or PDF. Doc is too much of a hassle compared to the others on my end - requires downloading the file and loading the appropriate program, which is slow and clunky on my system. Whereas most browsers nowadays have no issue loading a pdf file within it.

But plain text, while being a bit limited in expression, is superior. Having to force the user to download a file just to see the submission feels awkward. With plain, it's right there on the page, and the reader can freely download it if they like it enough to warrant wanting to.

Some might say that plain text having no formatting is bothersome, but it's not that hard to make it look good and readable, even on FA where there's little support for writing. It's more about the content than how pretty it looks.

After rereading what I wrote, I'd like to emphasize that all this is merely my opinion, hehe - I'm not saying that anyone who thinks differently is wrong.

Not exactly my fault FA can't into stories! It's one of the reasons why I'm trying to make a bigger presence over on SoFurry, because they're so story-friendly.

And personally a story is 70% content, 30% formatting for me. If it's a dense mess of text with no spacing (or, god forbid more emoticons than words) then I'd be greatly put off from reading it.

Ah. I consider things like spacing and punctuation to just be natural - any competent writer can do them. But a lot of them make the mistake of putting too much emphasis on things like a custom font, or colored text, and stuff like that, which leads them away from plain text. At least, from what I've seen. Even when reading on paper or an e-reader, I've noted that nothing really outdoes plain lettering if it's written properly.

Ah, alright, I understand what you mean. As I noted above, however, plain-text won't work very well for my next-to-be-posted piece.

I see. I tend to avoid putting myself in that position, but hopefully it'll turn out well.

I prefer PDF, personally.

pdf

I prefer doc. On my tablet pdf creates a bit of a hassle.

Duly noted.

So pretty much this is a choice between Desktop users (PDF) vs. Tablet and Smart phone users (.doc).

Personally, I'd go with either Plain Text or PDF.

I was going to say something along the lines of "Are you sure that you didn't mix those two up?", but seeing how many phone/tablet users prefer .doc makes me wonder if it isn't myself who's mixing things up.

I also used to think pdf was better for phones and the like, I personally use it like that...
Well I'd go with pdf really.

HTML.

.doc is better than pdf for me

I think .txt is better because it allows you to read the story on the site without having to download it.

txt if you want to persist the amount of characters per rule and don't care about text markup, but please note that crossplatform isn't guaranteed since Windows has a different way of marking newlines in comparsion with unix-like (Linux, MacOSX, Android) systems. Also text encoding could be a problem as well (ANSI or Unicode / UTF-8)
pdf if you want to persist the amount of characters per rule and text markup, but please note that using an exotic text font could give problems and crossplatform-guarantee depends on the provided compitality of the pdf viewers of the operating systems.
mobi/epub the little twin of pdf, especially designed for tablets/smartphones.
(x)HTML (with CSS) if you want to persist the amount of characters per rule and text markup, but please note that using an exotic text font could still give problems unless you use a socalled 'Web Font'. Despite that it's more guaranteed that the text will appear the same on each platform.
rtf/doc(x)/ods if you want to pester you readers that they have to install an application to read the text with the proper layout and markup.