using STIX sans serif fonts for non-mathtext

Hi,

I am a fan of the STIX sans serif typeface for mathtext, but I was
wondering if it was possible to use this typeface for non-mathtext
text as well. My main use for this is ticklabels, which seem to render
in the non-mathtext font no matter what I do. I have tried using

ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(P.ScalarFormatter(useMathText=True))

to force the (scalar) major ticks to use mathtext and thus stixsans,
but this does not work. Am I doing something wrong here?

A better solution (for me) would be to use STIX sans serif faces as
the regular font, ie something like

rcParams["font.sans-serif"] = 'stixsans'

I know this is possible for serif fonts, and I know that a post to the
list back in 2008 noted that it was not (at that time) possible for
sans-serifs. I am curious to know if there has been any progress on
allowing STIX sans-serifs in non-mathtext text.

thanks,

Jeff Oishi