Comparing different ways for sans-serif math with LaTeX

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Sans-serif fonts are better for figures. Various of ways to typeset LaTeX math in sans-serif font are compared. Based on the results, sansmathfonts is recommended for use.

Background

Sans-serif fonts has a better readability when scaled down, and thus is the preferred font for figures in many journals.

However, it's not straightforward to typeset math formulas with in the figure, because using a simple \mathsf or \sf can be tricky and tedious. For example, \sf does not affect symbols inside in \mathbf{k}, and you have to use \boldsymbol{\sf k} to make k correctly displayed.

If you search on the web, you can find this heated Stack Overflow thread, where a dozen of different approaches are mentioned. But which one to choose, and why?

Results

To compare the behavior of different approaches, I'm using the following equation for testing:

\begin{gather*}
\sum abcDFZ\alpha \mu \omega \Gamma \Theta\\
\Psi=\operatorname{det} [
 \mathrm{e}^{\mathrm{i}\mathbf{k}_i\cdot\mathbf{r}_j}
 u_{\mathbf{k}_i}(\mathbf{r}_j)
]
\end{gather*}

The results are shown below, and the red symbols are ones that are not rendered correctly.

Comparison results in light theme

sansmath: Lowercase Greeks are not in sans-serif, and uppercase Greeks are in ugly slanted style.
sfmath: Lowercase Greeks are not in sans-serif.
sansmathfonts: Works perfectly.
Fira Math: \mathbf are not in sans-serif.
arev: Works nicely, but a little bit ugly.
cmbright: Font is too thin, and subscript \mathbf are not bold.

Conclusion

Just use sansmathfonts, it's simple and nice.

Code availability

The code for reproducing the results are available at AllanChain/sans-math-compare.

AllanChain / blog