Definitely give a teaser in straight text, so that we get interested and want to read on...

But I do like PDFs.

All for 'em, in fact. They work fine for me.

Fiirst, you must understand: People can be very, very lazy here. (I say this with great love, of course.)

I advocate plain text for that reason. Make it as easy as possible for people to read the story. It doesn't seem like it should be such a big hurdle to click on a file to read it, but for some, it is. Plain text was a poor option when I first started uploading to FA (which is why I have a lot of RTFs in my gallery), but now that we can use BBCode for bold and italics and other basic tags, there's no good reason not to use plain text IMO.

If you do decide to have the story as a file to download, I'd definitely include the first several paragraphs in the description.

Speaking strictly for myself, I find the use of PDF files to be quite worthwhile. Of course this is for me, as someone who is reasonably computer-savvy. Also, I know that I'm all but guaranteed to enjoy any story you put out, unless you get really whacked-out [*ahem* ]. And were it someone else whose stories I've read on a regular basis and tend to enjoy, I'd similarly not hesitate.

With someone whose writings I've never read before though, I'm not as certain. At the very least I'd definitely recommend putting a good 'teaser' of reasonable length (at least a couple/three paragraphs) in the description. But where I'm going with this is, do you want to shoot for the least common denominator (to paraphrase poetigress, people in general can be very very lazy) or do you want to shoot for the slightly more sophisticated reader, the one who's not just flipping through stories for, uhhh, certain entertainment purposes?

Speaking again for myself, I'd tend to overshoot that first category, and go with the PDFs for maximum readability. You may be cropping out the bottom 50% or so of potential readers, but then again they may not necessarily appreciate what you're actually trying to accomplish with your writing as much as the top 50%. Or whatever the percentages are. But yeah, definitely go with a good amount of teaser text too.

I think I prefer PDFs for anything longer than a few pages.

Post them in hexadecimal or octal. :)

This strikes me as less than ideal. :)

Doing a text teaser in the description would be good if you want to expand your audience. A lot of people on FA seem hesitant to download or read something that's not "right in their face". I use text files because most of my work is short pieces, but when I read other people's stories, I prefer a PDF or DOC file, especially for longer ones.

So, just to play devil's advocate to the above comments about how FA users are a lazy bunch of miscreants who need things shoved in their face ... well, yeah. I'm one of those. Keep in mind that while a small minority of us have a passion for reading and therefore have optimized our interface with Adobe, MSWord, etc., that not everyone has done that.

When I click on an RTF or DOC or PDF, it does not automatically come up nicely in the browser. It launches MSWord, which I usually don't have open, or Adobe Acrobat Reader, which takes forever and also chomps on a lot of my computer's memory. It is, frankly, a pain. Yes, it's a manageable pain, but if the document in question isn't something I have a strong interest in reading, I'm gonna pass. And probably the majority of FA readers are in a similar boat. And there's a fair amount of writing uploaded to FA. And people want to see things quickly.

A major concern as a writer is to lower as many barriers as possible between the reader and your story, both in the method of delivery and in the text itself. If it's a long story, I'd go with the suggestions above, that you upload the first part as text in the description of the uploaded file. I definitely get more comments when I upload something as text.

RTFs or Word documents never come up nicely in the browser, as far as I know -- they always have to be downloaded, which is part of why I wouldn't choose to use them as a "final" form for a story. In my experience PDFs generally do open in the browser, but I admit I almost never deal with Acrobat Reader. (I'm pretty sure this is an option one can set.)

I'm going back to add the first page or so of the story to the previews here, at the least; I'm not sure whether going forward I'll really put the whole story in BBCode as an adjunct to the PDF. I can see the argument for doing so (pretty much the one you laid out), but I find reading stories on most bulletin boards to be tiring if the story gets much past a thousand words. I know that sounds like a lot of typographer weeniedom on my part, but most web sites really don't put any effort into making long blocks of text comfortable to read, and bulletin boards are among the worst offenders, ironically.

PDF, because formatting matters.

Anybody can read it; whoever arm-flails over not having a reader is cordially invited to the Reader free download page on Acrobat’s Web site. There is a host of other freeware readers out there, some of them low-overhead, if I understand correctly. It preserves formats and lay-outs, unlike Word or RTF.

Plain text would be fine—if it could be formatted. It can’t.

Text can be formatted in the description, at least, but I agree that cramming the whole story (or chapter or whatever) into the description is, um, not polite.

The real problem, in the end, is that the gallery software is unfriendly to anything but still images. Until Further Affinity starts using something that gracefully handles text submissions, we’re just stuck. Even music is better accommodated.

I mostly agree, but I have to admit that if you don't have a PDF-viewing browser plug-in, you may be loathe to download a story for much the same reason that I know I'm less inclined to download an RTF or Word document. The layout has very little to do with it -- it's about context switching. It's the difference between (1) click to download, (2) tell it where to save the file, (3) find the downloaded file (which may involve using Finder/Explorer to open the folder the file was downloaded into: remember, both Mac and Windows default now to using a "Download" folder), (4) open the file, (5) wait for the separate viewing software to load, (6) read the file, (7) switch back to the browser to comment on it. Compare this to (1) click to read, (2) click "back" to comment on it.

For practical purposes I equate "plain text" to BBCode text -- putting things in the description. I haven't played around with doing BBCode or HTML uploads, to the site, but since there's no way to mark uploads "private" I don't want to be mucking about with that in public view. But the general consensus here seems to point toward "PDFs are fine, but put the first page of the story or so in the description block, too, so people can start reading without going through another click."

The lack of accommodation to text here is something that irks me, but I think people have been complaining about it for years to no avail. It'd be nice to be able to actually have the "theme" dropdown give me a few story genres. It's great and all that I'd be able to mark a story as "Pokemon (Tame)", but how about "horror" and "science fiction" for fuck's sake.

Of course, I'm working on gallery software that's friendlier to text, so to speak. Slowly, but measurably! (Although it won't have a theme dropdown at all, just tagging.)

Amen; I can’t disagree with any of that!

I prefer PDF, and I'm prepared to make the extra clicks to avoid reading text in FA's style (ugh). But, if others want the text 'in their faces', perhaps you should post in plain text with a link to an externally-hosted PDF?

The mutually unacceptable compromise we seem to have settled on for the nonce is to have a plain text (well, BBCode) excerpt so people can start reading before they download the PDF. It's possible if the story's short enough I'll have the entire thing in the 'comment' field but it seems that most people are willing to actually click on the PDF -- at least among the sample of people who took the time to comment. I don't know how representative they are, but, well.

I think PDFs are fine. It gives you better control of the way in which your text appears, and a unit form equivalent to the JPG or PNG file used by artists that takes a little extra effort to chop up and redistribute without your identifying mark on it. Your writing is worth the effort of one whole extra mouseclick. Someone who is too lazy to do even that, well, they don't deserve to read it.

^ This!

With ebook readers getting more popular, PDF is not so good an option anymore. The displays of these devices are better suited for plain text display compared with the special fonts and formatting a PDF requires. Besides, a story like Travelling Music is about 60K text and 500K PDF - it might not be as much of a problem these days as it used to be, but I'd prefer to use the additional space for more texts instead of fancy formatting - which probably is more of a problem than an advantage on a coarse epaper display anyway.

PDF to text conversion could help, but I tried it (again with Travelling Music) and the result doesn't look good, too many special characters which would need conversion and fltering.

Just my opinion...

Without getting too deeply into Nerdville, converting to PDF is pretty easy but converting from PDF into, well, nearly anything else turns out to be really challenging -- it's not just the special characters and the formatting and such, it's the way the text is actually stored in the PDF. Some ebook readers can display PDFs natively rather than convert them.

I am going to find ways to get these stories (and others) into more "ebook-friendly" formats in the future, hopefully sooner rather than later, and will probably go back here and add links to them when those show up. Once Claw & Quill, a kind of FA-like site specializing in writing, gets going that will likely be my primary posting place, and it may have tools to make this sort of thing much easier. (I'll post about any new work here, of course -- while I'm definitely hoping C&Q takes off, FA is where a lot of users are!)