The right way to get sans-serif math? [duplicate]

Question

I notice that beamer has everything in sans-serif by default, including math. In a regular article, simply using \sffamily doesn't cause math to be set in sans-serif. Using \renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault} doesn't work and the sansmath package sort of works, but seems to produce varying results with respect to whether letters are italic or not (e.g., in beamer \Gamma is not italicized, but with sansmath it is.)

Is there one "right" way to do this?

Edit: another problem is that \sansmath seems to turn \beta into "fi".

Answer 1

There are not many real sans serif math fonts. You can try

\usepackage{cmbright}

that has math symbol fonts, except for the "large symbols". Perhaps decent results can be obtained by loading the Iwona font:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{cmbright}
\SetSymbolFont{largesymbols}{normal}{OMX}{iwona}{m}{n}
\begin{document}
\[
abc+\sum_{k=1}^{n}\int_{0}^{k}\sqrt{2}f(x)\,dx
\]
\end{document}

A different approach could be with the Arev fonts; changing the preamble above into

\usepackage{arevtext,arevmath}

you'd get the following

You find an extensive description of (free) math fonts at this address

http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/Free_Math_Font_Survey/en/survey.pdf

Answer 2

For me (with font set to \usepackage{helvet}), the packages mathastext and isomath did the job to get a consistent appearance (text in mathmode in same style as default text):

\usepackage[italic]{mathastext}
% 'isomath' sets upper case greek letters italic in accordance with 
% the International Standard ISO 80000-2
\usepackage{isomath}