Thai font · OFL

Chonburi

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · June 13, 2026

Information verified as of June 2026

What Chonburi is

Chonburi is a high-contrast looped display serif from Cadson Demak, released on Google Fonts in July 2015 with a single Regular weight under the SIL Open Font License. It covers Thai and Latin and is built for headlines, not paragraphs.

The name comes from Chonburi province on Thailand’s east coast, following the foundry’s habit of naming fonts after Thai places — the same convention behind Sriracha and Pattaya, both also names of places in Chonburi province. The project README describes the brief plainly: a display face for “headlines and titles in both formal and semi-formal type of work”, with a deliberate approach to thick and thin strokes in the Thai glyphs.

Among free Thai display faces, Chonburi occupies the formal end. It is the closest thing the Google Fonts Thai catalogue has to a Didone headline voice — fat verticals, hairline horizontals, looped heads kept intact.

Character design and tone

Chonburi applies Didone contrast logic to Thai: heavy vertical strokes against thin horizontals, with traditional looped heads preserved on consonants such as ภ and ม. The README notes that forms were simplified from traditional Thai structures to keep each glyph’s character while improving clarity at display sizes.

That simplification matters. Many traditional looped faces lose their loops to ink traps and clutter when set large and tight; Chonburi keeps the loop as a visible design feature, a dark dot anchoring each letterhead. The contrast does the rest of the talking. At 60px and above the texture is confident and editorial, somewhere between a Thai magazine masthead and a luxury label.

The Latin is drawn to match — a fat-face serif with the same vertical stress — so bilingual lockups hold together without a substitute headline font.

Weights and availability

Chonburi ships exactly one style: Regular (400), upright, no italics, no variable axis. Coverage spans Thai, Latin, Latin Extended, and Vietnamese.

One weight is the design’s biggest practical limit. There is no Light for understated covers and no Black for louder posters; hierarchy has to come from size and colour rather than weight. The GitHub repository distributes both compiled TTF/OTF builds and the .glyphs source file, so studios with a type budget can commission modifications under the OFL.

How to download Chonburi

Chonburi is a free download from Google Fonts: one ZIP, one weight, no registration. Three routes:

1. Google Fonts ZIP — open the Chonburi specimen, click “Get font”, and download the family ZIP.
2. CSS embed — load https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Chonburi&display=swap in a <link> tag, then set font-family: 'Chonburi', serif;.
3. GitHub source — the cadsondemak/chonburi repository carries TTF, OTF, and .glyphs source under OFL-1.1.

Best use cases

Chonburi belongs in headlines at 40px and above — magazine covers, posters, packaging, and event identities that want formal Thai drama. Strong briefs:

• Editorial mastheads and feature openers for Thai magazines
• Premium packaging: chocolate, spirits, cosmetics, hotel collateral
• Wedding and event identities in a formal Thai register
• Restaurant and café signage where a looped serif signals tradition with polish

Where it fails: body text of any kind — the hairline horizontals collapse below roughly 20px — plus UI work and any system that needs more than one weight. Long-form editorial setting belongs to a text serif like Pridi or Taviraj.

Pairings

Chonburi needs a quiet text family underneath it; the contrast is the headline’s job alone. Three combinations:

• Sarabun — the default neutral Thai body under a Chonburi headline; see Sarabun
• Bai Jamjuree — a crisper, more contemporary body for branding systems; see Bai Jamjuree
• Anuphan — loopless engineered body text when the layout mixes heavy Thai display with bilingual UI; see Anuphan

Sizing and hierarchy guidance is in the Thai typography guide.

Licensing

Chonburi is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, and embedding, with the OFL notice required to travel with the files. The copyright line reads “Copyright (c) 2015, Cadson Demak”. Verify at the Google Fonts specimen or the GitHub repository. A packaging run or a paid event identity needs no additional licence.

Information verified as of June 2026