16

What is the correct way of having all operator names be set in, say, sans serif? Saying

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\makeatletter
\def\operator@font{\sf}
\makeatother
\DeclareMathOperator\operator{operator}
\begin{document}
An $\operator 1$.
\end{document}

seems to do the trick, but amsopn.sty defines

\def\operator@font{\mathgroup\symoperators}

which seems to do more...

It would be nice if there were a @-free way of doing this, by the way.

Mariano Suárez-Álvarez
  • 2,795
  • 1
    You need to redefine \operator@font, which is used in other macros with that name. Either use \makeatletter and \makeatother or rewrite amsopn.sty in order not to use \operator@font. I guess that the choice is easy. :) – egreg Feb 02 '12 at 00:02

2 Answers2

18

You can define a new symbol font, and also redefine \mathsf to use it, otherwise you'd waste a math group and there are only 16 of them:

\DeclareSymbolFont{sfoperators}{OT1}{cmss}{m}{n}
\DeclareSymbolFontAlphabet{\mathsf}{sfoperators}

\makeatletter
\def\operator@font{\mathgroup\symsfoperators}
\makeatother
egreg
  • 1,121,712
1

You ask in a comment how to get this to work in unicode-math and were asked to post a new question. For the sake of anyone searching for the answer (or flagging a duplicate question):

To set the operatorfont to something other than \mathrm, use, for example:

\setoperatorfont\mathsf

This also works with math font faces you define with \setmathfontface, not only the built-in math alphabets.

To change the \mathrm font, use \setmathrm. If you’ll be using it in \boldmath, you might also want to \setboldmathrm.

Davislor
  • 44,045