Roman numerals in sans serif fonts

Question

_{Inspired by a question, that unfortunately has been deleted by the OP after getting some hints from me in a comment.}

Lacking serifs the Roman numerals in sans serif fonts look sometimes a bit strange. Do you have some ideas for a workaround?

Answer 1

I would suggest the package romanbar. This produces Roman numerals with an over- and an underline, and without serifs.

The basic command for this is \Romanbar{⟨arabic number⟩}, this works also with counters inside! You can instead include a Roman numeral, as well. For more abilities see example file of package documentation.

An example (note, in KOMA-Script all titles are by default printed in sans serif fonts):

\documentclass[numbers=endperiod]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\usepackage{romanbar}

\begin{document}

\section{section I vs. \Romanbar{\thesection}}
MDCLXVI vs. \Romanbar{1666}.

\stepcounter{section}
\section{section III vs. \Romanbar{\thesection}}
MDCLXVI vs. \Romanbar{MDCLXVI}.

\setcounter{section}{1665}
\section{section MDCLXVI vs. \Romanbar{\thesection}}
2014 vs. \Romanbar{2014} vs. \Romanbar{\relax 2014}.

\end{document}

This package is BTW based on egreg’s answer to a question here on TeX.SE: Roman numerals with over- and underline (the OP Stephen is also the package author).