Acrobat Reader is free and incredibly useful to have - whether you're dowloading tax forms from the IRS or a users manual for a product or a catalog. Here's the link:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html
The full product is somewhat expensive, but not considering its capabitlities. An experienced user could scan recipes into pdf and have a recipe book searchable by keyword. You can also regulate who saves, prints, etc. Pretty amazing.
Problem with plain text is that you'll lose photos of plates or wine label graphics - I don't know if that's important to you cape chef.
Regardless of the file format, I still say uploading to a third-party website is better than putting a monster file on the ChefTalk server. Keeps ChefTalk out of the copyright issue, too.
[This message has been edited by David Jones (edited 01-31-2001).]
[This message has been edited by David Jones (edited 01-31-2001).]