Can one change the font used by csquotes?

Question

I have a XeLaTeX document that uses Palatino Linotype as main font, which looks quite nice, and I'm using the csquotes package to effect proper quotation, which works; however, at the same time this looks horrible due to Palatino's "distinctive" choice in glyphs.

Is there a way to make csquotes use a different font for its quotation replacement? I went through the manual but couldn't find anything obvious (if it requires overriding environments or writing plain TeX, that's a thing I've not done in over a decade and I no longer have any idea what would be involved)

Reduced example:

\documentclass[11pt, lettersize, oneside]{book}
\usepackage{tocloft}
\usepackage{relsize}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\usepackage{csquotes}
\MakeOuterQuote{"}

\pagestyle{plain}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\setmainfont{Palatino Linotype}
\usepackage[b5paper, bindingoffset=0mm, inner=23mm, outer=23mm, top=21mm, bottom=24mm]{geometry}
\usepackage[xetex, pdfborder=0 0 0]{hyperref}

\begin{document}

    The first words were: "these glyphs are not particularly good looking.",
  and one had to agree. They looked all angular and terrible.

\end{document}

And corresponding screenshot:

Personal notions of aesthetics aside, for the purposes of this particular document Palatino's quotation are quite poor, and I am looking for a way to use a different font specifically only for these quotation glyphs.

Answer 1

The code in csquotes works on the basis that language-dependent quotation styles map to logical mark up for quotes (see csquotes.def). In particular, for English the standard mapping is to use \textquotedblleft and \textquotedblright as the quote symbols. One could therefore redefine these to use some some font/symbol combination. Could do with more refinement, but for example

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{csquotes}
\MakeOuterQuote{"}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{texgyrepagella-regular.otf}
\DeclareTextCommand{\textquotedblleft}{TU}{%
  {\fontfamily{ptm}\selectfont ``}%
}
\DeclareTextCommand{\textquotedblright}{TU}{%
  {\fontfamily{ptm}\selectfont ''}%
}
\begin{document}
    The first words were: "these glyphs are not particularly good looking.",
  and one had to agree. They looked all angular and terrible.

\end{document}

would work.

(Note that this is really nothing specific to csquotes, which quite deliberately uses logical markup for the quote symbols taken from a lower level.)

Answer 2

There is more than one "Palatino" font out there. The one you appear to have picked -- "Palatino Linotype" -- indeed has the "squattest" and "stubbiest" (short, barely curved) double-quotation marks among the various Palatino candidates. Not only that, it's also the most cramped-looking of all Palatino variants I'm familiar with.

Before you engage in what amounts to a type crime spree, by mixing-and-mismatching quotation marks from other font families, I believe you owe it to yourself to consider other fonts that are either in the Palatino clan or are somewhat recognizable as relatives. The following screenshot shows six candidates, starting with Palatino Linotype (your current favorite); all font specimens are scaled so that they have the exact same x-heights.

As this screenshot demonstrates (I hope...), there is quite some variation among the fonts' double-quotation marks. If you really can't stand the double-quotation marks of Palatino Linotype, you may want to contemplate making a switch to either Palatino nova or to Aldus, or, if you feel really bold, to Dante.

% !TeX program = xelatex
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec,csquotes}
\newcommand\hello{\enquote{Hello World}}

\begin{document}
\setmainfont{Palatino Linotype}
\hello --- Palatino Linotype (Zapf)

\setmainfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Palatino}
\hello --- Palatino (Zapf)

\setmainfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{TeX Gyre Pagella}
\hello --- Pagella (Palatino clone)

\setmainfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Palatino nova Regular}
\hello --- Palatino nova (Zapf \& Kobayashi)

\setmainfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Aldus LT Std}
\hello --- Aldus (Zapf)

\setmainfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Dante MT Std}
\hello --- Dante (Mardersteig)
\end{document}

Answer 3

As a specific-to-XeLaTeX solution, this can be done by relying on XeTeX's ability to inject active tokens between characters from specific character classes, with macro substitution for those tokens:

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{SomeFont}
\newfontfamily{\QuoteFont}{SomeOverrideFont}[Ligatures=TeX]

\usepackage{csquotes}
\MakeOuterQuote{"}

% enable inter-character token insertion and token triggers
\XeTeXinterchartokenstate=1

% A collection of active glyphs for this purpose. Assigning a class
% for characters that already belong to a class simply reassigns them.
\newXeTeXintercharclass\Quotes
\XeTeXcharclass`'=\Quotes
\XeTeXcharclass`"=\Quotes
\XeTeXcharclass`,=\Quotes
\XeTeXcharclass`’=\Quotes
\XeTeXcharclass`’=\Quotes
\XeTeXcharclass`“=\Quotes
\XeTeXcharclass`”=\Quotes

% transitions from/to Basic Latin
\XeTeXinterchartoks 0 \Quotes = {\begingroup\selectfont\QuoteFont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks \Quotes 0 = {\endgroup}

% transitions from/to word boundaries
\XeTeXinterchartoks 4095 \Quotes = {\begingroup\selectfont\QuoteFont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks \Quotes 4095 = {\endgroup}

Putting this in the preamble (or saving as some quotestyle.tex and then using \input{quotestyle.tex} in the preamble of course) results in text typeset with the main font, and formatted with smart quote replacement through csquotes but using a secondary font for the quote glyphs.

(Also note that for older versions of XeTeX, the boundary class is 255 rather than 4095)

This worked better for me than Joseph Wright's answer, as this allowed me to override more than just double qoutes, but if you need a generic every-LaTeX answer for just double quotes, his suggestion works quite well.

Answer 4

As an alternate solution to the problem of Palatino's quotation marks, I have modified Tex Gyre Pagella X to use the quotations from Tex Gyre Termes X (ie the end result is identical to Palatino with Times New Roman quotation marks), and threw in some extra Greek and Cyrillic coverage from Domitian. The result, Tex Gyre Parliamentary—so named because identical to the `Book Antiqua Parliamentary' typeface used for drafting UK legislation— can be downloaded from my Github.

It produces the following result:

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