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ThaiGraph

Free Thai Fonts

Free Thai fonts are typefaces you can download and use at no cost, and most on this page are licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), so they are safe for commercial work too. Every font below has its license verified against the foundry's original release, with a direct free-download link and install steps on each page. See the Thai font licensing guide or test any font with your own text.

72 fonts in this category. Click any entry for its full page with weights, license details, and install steps.

What the SIL Open Font License actually lets you do

The OFL grants you the right to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute and sell copies of the font, free of charge, for any kind of design work — including commercial work, with no permission needed and no payment. The official text of version 1.1, dated 26 February 2007, states the grant in one sentence: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of the Font Software, to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font Software, subject to the following conditions."

SIL's own OFL-FAQ answers the questions designers actually ask. On print, logos and manufactured objects (Q1.1): "Yes. You are very welcome to do so. Authors of fonts released under the OFL allow you to use their font software as such for any kind of design work." On embedding in a document (Q1.12): "Yes, either in full or a subset." On webfonts (Q2.1): "Yes! Go ahead!" There is no subject-matter restriction anywhere in the licence.

What the OFL forbids — the three that catch people

You cannot sell the font on its own, you cannot keep a reserved name on a modified version, and your derivative has to stay under the OFL.

  1. No selling the font by itself. Condition 1: "Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself." The reasoning is at Q1.6: "The intent is to keep people from making money by simply redistributing the fonts." Bundling is fine — Q1.5 permits shipping OFL fonts alongside commercial ones "as long some other font or software is also on the disk".
  2. No reusing a Reserved Font Name. Condition 3: "No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font Name(s) unless explicit written permission is granted by the corresponding Copyright Holder." Q5.1 defines these as "font names, or portions of font names, that the author has chosen to reserve for use only with the Original Version of the font". Condense, restyle or re-hint an OFL Thai font and you rename it. ThaiGraph Condensed is a worked example: a condensed derivative of Anuphan, renamed for exactly this reason.
  3. The licence travels with the file. Condition 5: the font "must be distributed entirely under this license, and must not be distributed under any other license." You cannot relicense a derivative as proprietary.

Breach any of those and the licence ends: "This license becomes null and void if any of the above conditions are not met."

OFL is not the only licence on this page

Of the 72 fonts above, 36 are OFL and the other 36 run on five regimes with materially different rules. Calling them all "free Thai fonts" is true and useless. What the other 36 actually are:

RegimeCountThe rule that differs
GPL v2+ with font exception (TLWG)7Copyleft on derivative fonts; documents are exempt
Bitstream Vera terms1Modify freely, but rename; no selling the font alone
GPL (JS Technology)5Copyleft, no separate font exception in the file
DIP-SIPA National Font terms8Written notice to the rights holder; naming rules vary
Individual author grant15Read the release page; terms are per-font

The GPL font exception is the clause most Thai licensing guides leave out, and the one that matters most. Without it, embedding a GPL font in a PDF or EPUB would arguably make the document a GPL derivative. The fonts-tlwg COPYING file grants it: "As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the GNU General Public License." That is what makes Garuda, Kinnari, Norasi, Loma, Purisa, Sawasdee and Umpush usable in commercial deliverables. The exception to the exception is Waree: the same file states it is not GPL but on Bitstream's terms, which require a modified version to be renamed to drop "Bitstream" or "Vera" and prohibit selling the font alone.

"Free to download" and "free to use commercially" are separate permissions. f0nt.com, the main channel for independent Thai type, defines its personal-use category as ฟอนต์ที่ผู้สร้างสรรค์อนุญาตให้ใช้งานเฉพาะงานส่วนตัว ที่ไม่ก่อให้เกิดรายได้เท่านั้น — permitted only for personal work generating no income — against a separate commercial-free category. At the date of checking those ran to 81 and 27 pages of listings respectively. Nothing from the personal-use class appears on this page; see handwritten Thai fonts for the category where the ratio in the wild is worst.

The National Fonts, and the three that break the pattern

The state-commissioned Thai National Fonts are free but not OFL, and three of the thirteen invert the OFL's renaming rule. The set was released on 28 June 2007 from a competition run by the Department of Intellectual Property with SIPA, per f0nt.com's release record. Wikipedia's National Fonts article records the adoption: "On 7 September 2010, the Council of Ministers officially announced the thirteen fonts as the public fonts, naming them the 'national fonts'", with agencies "required to cease to use the private sector's fonts by 5 December 2010".

Theppitak Karoonboonyanan, the long-time maintainer of Thai font packaging, documents the complication in a thai-linux-foss-devel thread: มีอยู่ 3 ฟอนต์ที่มี license แตกต่างจากเพื่อน คือ TH Charmonman, TH Srisakdi, TH Charm of AU ซึ่งเจ้าของลิขสิทธิ์ไม่ใช่ DIP-SIPA แต่เป็นของ ศ.ดร. ศรีศักดิ์ จามรมาน — those three are owned by Prof. Dr. Srisakdi Charmonman, not DIP-SIPA. Where the standard terms forbid reusing the original name on a modified version, these three require the adapter to keep the name and append a version number, as in "TH Srisakdi 1.0" — the exact opposite of OFL condition 3. This site hosts one of them, TH Charm of AU. Whole set at Thai National Fonts.

How to check a licence before using a font commercially

Four checks, in this order, cover almost every case:

  1. Find the licence file, not the download page. Look inside the archive for OFL.txt, LICENSE, COPYING or a README. Marketing copy saying "free" is not a licence.
  2. Identify the class. OFL grants commercial use outright. GPL means check for the font exception before embedding. A per-author grant means read the actual sentence — Anakotmai's release page states สามารถดาวน์โหลดใช้งานได้อย่างอิสระรวมทั้งเชิงพาณิชย์, free to use including commercially.
  3. Check modification and naming separately. Using and modifying are different permissions. OFL requires a rename; the Srisakdi Charmonman fonts require the opposite.
  4. Check webfont and app embedding again. Open licences cover it; commercial desktop licences usually do not — see premium Thai fonts.

The full walkthrough is in the Thai font licensing guide. To try a shortlist, use the Thai font tester or browse by look at sans-serif, looped and loopless.

Name variants and spellings

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