One alphabet in a different font

Question

I wanted a sans serif font in Latex, where the capital I looks different than the small l. I came across droid font, which is nice but too wide and takes up too much space. Currently, I am using

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}

The "solution" I am thinking of is to only use capital I of the droid font, with everything else remaining the same. Is it possible? If so, how?

Answer 1

THIS IS NOT RECOMMENDED, not only because of tohecz's comment, but because making letters active can break all sorts of things (e.g., any macro with a capital "I" in its name). Nonetheless, here is a way to use a different capital I without creating a whole new font.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\let\svcapi I
\catcode`I=\active
\defI{$\mathcal{\svcapi}$}
\begin{document}
Is this doing capital I in a different font?
\end{document}

Alternatively, to achieve a manual implementation that avoids the active letter problem, you could \def\myI{$\mathcal{\svcapi}$} and use \myI{} whereever you wanted the alternate "I", as in \myI{}s this doing capital \myI{} in a different font?

Answer 2

As I said in my comment, you can trys the cabin font. It also has small caps, greek and cyrillic glyphs. Here is a demo. As the kerning is rather tight, in my opinion, I used some letterspacing with the help of the microtype package:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{cabin}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
\usepackage{microtype}

\usepackage[x11names]{xcolor}

\begin{document}

\SetTracking[no ligatures = {f}]{encoding = *}{10}\lsstyle
In this font, the small letter \textcolor{Tomato3}{l} is noticeably different from capital \textcolor{Tomato3}{I} and from the number \textcolor{Tomato3}{1}: Prosper Mérimée wrote his fantastic novella ‘La Vénus d’Ille’ in 1835.

\end{document}