pdf, doc ?

Created small sample document in M$ doc and converted it to .pdf
via some online converter, however pdf comes out bigger 34-->56 kb) than doc ! Samle pdf seems can't be compressed any further - tryed a couple of compressors.

Any suggestion in which format should I accept/keep articles submited by users ? Is there anything else than pdf ? or is pdf the right thing, or even .doc ?

I believe PDF is the best if you don’t want the document to be modified by others, and also it’s widely supported while not everybody might be able to open DOC files.

You can export documents as PDF with OpenOffice (http://openoffice.org/) (which is the same as MS Office but open source and for free) but I’ve never cared about compression or file size so I can’t say if that’s better.