Comparing different ways for sans-serif math with LaTeX

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.

• 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.