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I've just started using font Palatino for my documents, and I've realized the opening quotes are all rendered as closing quotes. As per the question What is the best way to use quotation mark glyphs? I use ``hello'' to quote, but somehow Palatino is always showing both as closed. If I uncomment \usepackage[sc]{mathpazo} then they are rendered correctly. How can I fix this?

Mensch
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Bruno Stonek
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  • Note that newpxtext and newpxmath are more up-to-date replacements for mathpazo in PDFTeX. In LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX, you can use any version of Palatino (or its clone TeX Gyre Pagella) as your text font, and either Asana Math or TeX Gyre Pagella Math as the math font. Asana Math is based on Young Ryu’s mathpazo fonts. – Davislor Dec 13 '20 at 03:44

3 Answers3

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With a minimal example like:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage[sc]{mathpazo}
\begin{document}
``text''
\end{document}

I'm getting the following results:

With the standard font:

normal

With [sc]{mathpazo}:

methpazo

As you can see the lines of the quotes point in the same direction in both cases (opening quotes point to the upper right and the closing quotes to the lower left corner) and the opening and closing quotes are different. However with mathpazo they are much similar as with the standard computer modern.

If this is the same result you are getting I guess this is by design with this font and not incorrect. I don't think you can replace just the quotation characters of a font, so if you don't like them you have to use another font.

If you get something different, please post a minimal example (or refer to mine) and post links to the result like I did.

Martin Scharrer
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    Wow-- that is what I'm getting. What a strange choice for left quotations! Surely there must be a way to circumvent this... I wouldn't want to change fonts, just when I got used to these! – Bruno Stonek Feb 25 '11 at 23:43
  • @Bruno: As I said, I don't know how to change just the quotation characters, but another user here might be. You could try to use the csquotes package to define different quotes... – Martin Scharrer Feb 25 '11 at 23:49
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    @Bruno: You could define some macro for quotes like \newcommand*\enquote[1]{\textsf{``}#1\textsf{''}} (csquotes already provides a \enquote macro) and then \enquote{text} to get different quotes. You could also switch fonts instead of \textsf. But I doubt that would look good. – Martin Scharrer Feb 25 '11 at 23:54
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    If your output is to PDF and you have Acrobat Distiller and a "real" Palatino font installed, then use DVIPS to generate your output. Distiller will replace the mathpazo font with Palatino, which has the expected 66/99 quotation marks. – Stan Rogers Feb 26 '11 at 00:23
  • It's kind of annoying to use \enquote every time I want to quote. The textsf workaround seems quite alright, if nothing better shows up I may just write my document as usual and then just search&replace. As to Acrobat Distiller, I don't have that software. – Bruno Stonek Feb 26 '11 at 00:51
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    @Stan — the output shown in this answer is a real Palatino design. If distiller is changing the style then it's definitely not using Palatino. – Will Robertson Feb 26 '11 at 03:30
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Please no! There is no "fixing" here — this is the design of the font. All Palatino-based fonts use this design and to switch just the quotation marks is to some degree a heresy.

Having said that, the Microsoft Palatino knockoff Book Antiqua has a similar look to Palatino but with more convention quotation marks. I don't recommend it, but it might be worth a look.

Will Robertson
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    And this proves it. – Caramdir Feb 26 '11 at 04:08
  • @Caramdir — great link! – Will Robertson Feb 26 '11 at 04:09
  • Would it be practical to use FontForge to create a modified Palatino font with edited quotation marks? Would the pdfs generated show the edited quotation marks on anybodies computer? Would embedding the font be an extra step in LaTeX if I did that? – user12711 Jul 04 '15 at 23:57
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    @user12711 — would you want to?? The other answers on this page show specifically that the quotation marks are not incorrect. But yes, if you create your own font from a Palatino clone (ensuring the license permits this of course) and choose to muck up the quotation marks, you'll be able to select it and use it in a LaTeX document. Installing postscript fonts for pdfLaTeX is a comparative pain; you'd be advised to use an OpenType font in XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX instead. – Will Robertson Jul 05 '15 at 01:49
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I have used FontForge to create a modified version of Palatino (specifically Michael Sharpe's TexGyrePagellaX) with quotation marks from Times New Roman (specifically Michael Sharpe's TexGyreTermesX). This also happens to perfectly mirror the typeface used in UK legislation (Book Antiqua Parliamentary). The font can be downloaded here, and produces the following result:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{TeX Gyre Parliamentary}
\begin{document}
    ``Hello world.'' --- \TeX\  Gyre Parliamentary
\end{document}

enter image description here

ezgranet
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