fontssans-serif
When using \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, my understanding was that the fonts were pretty much the same as the defaults, except that they carried native accentuated characters. Now, I use sans-serif in my document, and the difference is really important between T1 and the default. Here is the result (top is default, bottom is T1):
Question: How can I have the regular sans-serif fonts with a document using T1? Note; I only need the accents in the main, serifed text.
Thanks!
Relative newcomers to the TeX world are Google's droid fonts, but a package was recently put on CTAN. It has the feature you want for capital I.
\documentclass{article}
\renewcommand*{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
\usepackage{droid}
\begin{document}
\Huge This is droid sans. I like it.
\end{document}
No swish on i or l, but j does.
I suggest you take a look at Michael Sharpe's mathalfa (the spelling "mathalpha" works too) package. In the package's user guide, the author lists five "hollowed-out" and fourteen [!] "geometric" variants of blackboard-bold fonts. (Note that not all of the underlying fonts are free.) I trust that one or more of the math blackboard board fonts listed and/or made available through the mathalfa package will meet your needs. (I'm afraid I don't have access to German-language math textbooks.)
A big plus of using the mathalfa package is that you can "mix and match" various math alphabets (blackboard bold, caligraphic, curly, script, fraktur, etc) with ease. Excerpting from the README file that comes with the mathalfa package:
This package provides a standard means of setting math alphabets associated with the macros \mathcal, \mathbb, \mathfrak and \mathscr and, where available, their bold counterparts \mathbcal, \mathbbb, \mathbfrak and \mathbscr.
It mostly bypasses the usual fd and sty files used to load these alphabets in order to allow each to be scaled independently and without silently quantizing the sizes.
Best Answer
It is a big difference. It depends on the tastes of Jörg Knappen who designed the European Modern fonts and apparently liked less heavy sans serif fonts.
With
\usepackage{lmodern}you'll get the same weight.