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Neither of \sfseries nor \sfshape seem to work. So what is the command I'm looking for to change the current group to sans serif? \bfseries, \scshape and \itshape work, but I can't find the sans serif command to do the same thing...

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See The LaTeX Wikibook for a full table. – Caramdir Dec 23 '10 at 23:34

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The command you want is \sffamily. I don't know why bold is a series (other font weights are too; it's probably a typographical term), but it should be clear why small caps and italics are shapes; sans-serif fonts are a family of fonts, hence the name. (While I understand the logic, it does feel like consistency would be nice….) There's a list in a TeX FAQ answer:

The default set of modal commands offers weights \mdseries and \bfseries, shapes \upshape, \itshape, \scshape and \slshape, and families \rmfamily, \sffamily and \ttfamily.

The commands, in order, activate medium weight, boldface, upright, italic, small caps, slanted, roman (serif), sans serif, and typewriter text (monospaced). To form the \textXX commands, the first two letters of the modal commands are always used.

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The microtype package also offers \lsstyle (and \textls) for letter-spaced text. – lockstep Dec 23 '10 at 23:41
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I believe the idea is that the family, series, and shape are orthogonal axes. One should be able to specify a weight (what LaTeX calls the series) and shape for a given font family. (This is selecting a typeface. Once you have also selected a size, then you have selected a font. E.g., Times is a font family, Times Italic Bold is a typeface, and 12 pt Times Italic Bold is a font. Wikipedia gets this wrong in their example.) – TH. Dec 23 '10 at 23:42
So you should be able to have bold sans serif small caps, but not bold italic small caps, becaus it and sc are both shapes? – Seamus Dec 24 '10 at 11:47
@Seamus: As far as I understand it, yes. – Antal S-Z Dec 24 '10 at 14:00
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For the reason why weights are named series, I believe that is a tradition. For example traditionally book weights are numbered as series 55, and bold is 65. For example the full name for Linotype Univers Roman is ... 55 Roman and the bold font is ... 65 Bold. – Yan Zhou Aug 16 '11 at 14:03

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