Verdana is so BIG. Whats a good second choice?

[DHTML Kitchen]

p {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
}


Arial is too small. What's a good second-choice? What's as big as Verdana (sans-serif)?

[fci]

try tahoma ? or how about just setting the font-size property.

[bradyj]

Helvetica

It usually needs to be just those completely -- verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif -- in whatever order you want. Are you giving them a font size too, that's important:

font-size: 12px;

or you can combine them:

font: 12px verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;

[DHTML Kitchen]

Sorry, I didn't explain well.

Verdana is big. Bigger than arial, helvetica, et c.

What is as big as Verdana? Arial is small.

[AaronW]

You can set font-size, so size is of little importance in choosing a font... If you want a list of web-safe (mostly) fonts, check out this page:

http://webdesign.maratz.com/lab/fonts_table/

[liorean]

You could have a look at Georgia. It's a serif, but it had the same design goals as Verdana. Other than that, you should know that fonts have an aspect ration as well as a font size. This aspect ratio is high for Verdana, Trebuchet MS and Georgia and moderate for Times New Roman and Arial. So, to correct for this aspect ration we have the CSS2.0 font-size-adjust property. It's value should be 0.58 for Verdana. (Note that Windows and Mac Verdana are slightly different. The Mac Verdana has a slightly lesser aspect ratio.)

(Also note that font-size-adjust is removed from CSS2.1, but makes it's return in CSS3.)