fonts
I'm looking to use a sans serif font that looks like this
but when using a particular LaTeX template, the same sans serif font looks like the following:
which is not the font I'm looking for; it's too thin despite it already being in bold face. The culprit seems to be this line
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
which, when deleted, causes the 2nd font to look like the first font. Why is this the case?
There are a number of issues to solve. The first is that redefining \mddefault in that way will not help, because \mddefault is not executed as part of \sffamily. The second is a traditional puzzle caused by some command being \long in a context and not \long in others.
A possible workaround is to redefine \curr@fontshape, that provides LaTeX with the current font attributes for later processing by NFSS.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{pdftexcmds}
\renewcommand{\sfdefault}{SourceSansPro-LF}
\makeatletter
\def\curr@fontshape{%
\f@encoding/\f@family/%
\ifnum\pdf@strcmp{\f@series}{\mddefault}=\z@
\ifnum\pdf@strcmp{\f@family}{\sfdefault}=\z@
l%
\else
\f@series
\fi
\else
\f@series
\fi/\f@shape}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\sffamily abcdef
\rmfamily abcdef
\end{document}
I used Source Sans Pro because it has the "light" series. More tests are needed if other font attributes need to be changed depending on the current family.
The font TeX Gyre Pagella is based on Palatino, which was designed by Herrmann Zapf. Within the past ten years or so, Zapf has designed a sans-serif font, called Palatino Sans, to accompany Palatino. Note, though, that Palatino Sans isn't free and isn't include in any of the standard TeX distributions.
You may want to use Helvetica as your document's sans serif font. If you do so, you should probably look into scaling Helvetica down a bit as its x-height is rather larger than that of Palatino.
Best Answer
The fonts used with OT1 and T1 encoding are different as the cm-super fonts used for T1 cover much more font sizes:
The first font is a 10pt-font
cmssbx10.pfbwhich has been scaled up and so is very bold, the second is a font specifically designed for this font sizesfsx2488.pfb.You could force the use of scaled up fonts with T1-encoding too, but imho it is better to use the properly designed fonts.