General ⇒ [font] how to change Roman to San serif?

[chao]

How to change the default font from Roman to San serif?
I mean whatever I type in the file without a font specification goes to Roman.
How can I change this to San serif?

Thanks!

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi chao,

that could be done by

Code: Select all

\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}

Stefan

[gmedina]

Using the cmbright package could be an option. Doing a search on CTAN will give you other alternatives.

[localghost]

How to change the default font from Roman to San serif? [...]

Note that from the typographical point of view it is not a good idea to typeset a whole document in sans serif font shape. This is only recommendable for pesentations. The serifs of a font serve as guidelines to the eye for better and more convenient reading.

Best regards
Thorsten¹

[chao]

but our univ. thesis requires arial to be used in general.

[localghost]

We could quarrel about sense and nonsense of such demands. It seems that some institutions are sticked to strange ideas of writing scientific documents. But you could try the txfonts package, which provides Times as default roman family style and a sans serif family similar to Helvetica (from which Arial is just a lousy copy). Together with the above mentioned switch by redefining the family default shape it should match your ideas.