Thai font · FREE

iannnnnGMO

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · August 29, 2026

Information verified as of August 2026

อ่านหน้า ฟอนต์ iannnnnGMO เป็นภาษาไทย — พร้อมลิงก์ดาวน์โหลดและวิธีติดตั้ง →

What iannnnnGMO is

iannnnnGMO is a free-for-commercial-use Thai looped display typeface listed on f0nt.com on 19 January 2005, drawn by Prachya Singhto under the handle iannnnn, and it exists because he tried to draw something as good as CordiaUPC Bold and produced something wobblier and better instead. It ships one weight, covers Thai and Latin completely, and had been downloaded 830,409 times when we read the counter on 29 August 2026.

It is the third most downloaded font in the iannnnn 2005 series, behind iannnnnMTV and iannnnnJPG, and it is the best-connected one. It points backwards at a Microsoft-bundled system face from 1992 and forwards at a 2025 family the same designer still maintains. No other font in the run does both.

The release page tags it display, fun, ล้อเลียน (pastiche), เด็ก (childlike) and เบี้ยว (crooked). Notably, f0nt.com does not tag it ลายมือ — handwriting. That is correct, and it is the first thing most write-ups get wrong: GMO is a drawn text face that came out irregular, not a handwriting font.

Why iannnnnGMO exists: a 2005 attempt at CordiaUPC Bold

The designer states the brief himself on the release page, and it is unusually specific for an amateur font of this era: he wanted to make something as good as CordiaUPC Bold, could not get there, and shipped what came out. His words:

ผมชอบฟอนต์ CordiaUPC (ตัวหนา) เป็นการส่วนตัวครับ มันสวยและดูมาตรฐานใช้งานง่ายดี วันนึงก็เลยอยากจะทำฟอนต์ให้ได้ดีแบบนั้นมั่ง แต่ทำไปทำมาก็ไปไม่เป็น ออกมาโยกเยกเอยอย่างที่เห็น สนุกดีเหมือนกันแฮะ

“I personally like the CordiaUPC font (the bold). It is handsome, it looks standard, it is easy to use. So one day I wanted to make a font that good myself, but it went nowhere and came out wobbly, as you can see. It was fun all the same.”

That names a real target. CordiaUPC is the geometric looped Thai sans that Microsoft has bundled with Windows and Office since Windows XP; Microsoft’s own description calls it “a geometric design, with simple, straight strokes combined with round curves”, with “no contrast between thick and thin strokes, even in the loops”, and credits Unity Progress Corp in 1992. In 2005 it was, for most Thai computer users, simply what type looked like. Choosing it as a model is choosing the default — and then missing.

The miss is the point. Where CordiaUPC’s strokes are ruled, GMO’s lean fractionally off vertical and its curves close at slightly different rates from letter to letter. It reads as the system font redrawn by hand from memory. That is a category f0nt.com had a tag for — เบี้ยว — and Cordia did not.

What the letterforms actually do

Measured from the shipped file, iannnnnGMO is an upright monoline with almost no stroke contrast, small closed round loops, wide even proportions, and a set of advance widths that vary far more than a machine-drawn face would allow. Reading the outlines at 2048 units per em:

The loops decide the character. On ด, บ and ผ the head closes into a small, perfectly round dot; on ก and ถ it is an open curl that stops just short of closing. Because there is no thick-to-thin modulation, those loops stay open at small sizes instead of filling in, which is the failure mode of most 2005 amateur Thai display faces.

The Latin is not an afterthought. Twenty-six capitals, twenty-six lowercase and ten Western digits are drawn as their own outlines rather than borrowed from the Thai, and they set with the same wide, even rhythm — closer to a geometric typewriter face than to anything Cordia’s Latin does.

How iannnnnGMO handles Thai script

Thai coverage is complete — all 87 assigned codepoints in the Thai block U+0E01 to U+0E5B are in the cmap with no gaps, Thai digits ๐ to ๙ included — and mark placement is handled by fixed glyph geometry rather than by shaping, which has one visible consequence. Every tone mark sits at the same height no matter what is underneath it.

Mai ek begins at y 1259, mai tho at 1227, mai tri at 1232 and mai chattawa at 1228. The tallest consonant in the face, ป, tops out at 1034. So a tone mark always clears a tall consonant with roughly 190 units to spare — and always floats about 430 units, a fifth of the em, above an ordinary one. Set ก่ or น่ and you can see the gap; set ปี่ or ที่, where an upper vowel fills the space, and it reads correctly.

That trade is not a bug the designer failed to notice. It is what the shared community template these fonts were built on does, and it is why the fonts worked identically in Photoshop and in Microsoft Word at a time when almost nothing did. The name table records the template by name: This font used : NP NaipolTemplate : Version 2.000. On the sequel, iannnnnGTO, the designer names the practical gain from a later template revision outright — เลยสระวรรณยุกต์ไม่ลอยในโปรแกรม Photoshop, so the vowels and tone marks stop floating in Photoshop.

Below-line vowels behave normally: สระอุ and สระอู both sit in a −358 to −47 band, clear of the baseline and clear of the descending tails.

What is inside the file, and what it will not do

The shipped file declares no Thai OpenType script at all: GSUB and GPOS both register only latn, with liga and kern, so every piece of Thai typography in this font is drawn geometry rather than shaping logic. There are no Thai mark-positioning rules and no alternate tone-mark forms for tall consonants. Anyone converting it to a webfont should know that before they ship it.

The rest of the technical picture, read with fontTools:

• unitsPerEm 2048; 238 glyphs; fsType 8, Editable embedding, so document embedding and webfont conversion are permitted at the binary level.
• head.created is 22 September 2005 — eight months after the 19 January listing date. The file you download today is the late-2005 rebuild the designer announced, not the January original. Every file in the run except iannnnnTKO was created between 20 September and 4 November 2005; the full chronology is on the iannnnn hub.
• A legacy kern table is present alongside GPOS. That makes GMO better fitted than its sibling iannnnnUBC, which has no GPOS and no kern at all.
• Five glyphs are drawn but unmapped: lochula.short, lulakkhangyao, rulakkhangyao, saraamleft and yamakkanleftthai. They are in the file and unreachable from any codepoint.
• nameID 13 reads For educations used only. — which contradicts the licence on the page it is served from. That is dealt with below.

If you want to see how a Thai face is put together from the other end, the guide to making a Thai font covers the modern equivalent of what a 2005 template did by hand.

Is iannnnnGMO free for commercial use?

Yes. The release page carries f0nt.com’s ใช้งานเชิงพาณิชย์ได้ฟรี badge — free for commercial use — twice, and the site’s licence page answers the commercial question directly. The contradicting string inside the font file is inherited template metadata, and f0nt.com’s own precedence rule is what settles it.

Every term that exists for this font, and the weight each one carries:

The licence page, published 28 กรกฎาคม 2552 (28 July 2009), sets the precedence rule in one sentence: you may download and use the fonts free of charge, but if any other agreement is stated by the font’s owner, as shown on the font’s download page or as a document file attached to the font, that agreement governs. The download page states the grant. No document is attached. So the release-page grant is what applies, and the name-table string — which travels with the template, not with the author — is neither of the two things that could displace it.

Three real restrictions do apply, and they are stricter than the SIL Open Font License that covers most free Thai fonts:

1. You may not sell the font file. Bundling it with a deliverable so the thing renders is fine; selling the font as the product is not.
2. You may not re-host it. Asked whether the files may be copied and offered for download elsewhere, the FAQ answers ไม่ได้จ้ะ. Descriptions and specimen images may be republished with attribution and a link back. That is why the download link below points at f0nt.com and never at a mirror.
3. Modifying to redistribute needs permission. Private modification is allowed; modifying in order to sell or hand on requires the owner’s consent.

This is our reading of published terms, not legal advice. For a high-value use, ask through the f0nt.com forum the licence page points to. The Thai font licensing guide walks the whole decision.

Where to download iannnnnGMO

The only authorised source is the iannnnnGMO release page on f0nt.com. Clicking the download button is what accepts the licence — the page says so in as many words: ข้อตกลง: คลิกดาวน์โหลด = ยอมรับสัญญาอนุญาต.

The archive is 2005_iannnnnGMO.zip and contains exactly one file, 2005_iannnnnGMO.ttf. There is no OTF, no variable version, no webfont build and no second weight. Anything advertising an “iannnnnGMO Bold” is not from this designer.

Two practical notes. Save the file from the release page rather than hot-linking the archive — not because the endpoint stops you (we checked on 29 August 2026: it serves the zip to a bare request with no Referer and no browser User-Agent) but because the f0nt.com licence forbids re-hosting the files, and the redirect target is an undocumented path that can move without notice. And because the file is a 2005 TrueType with no Thai OpenType script, test it in the actual application you intend to set it in before committing — the Thai font tester will show you the mark placement with your own text.

GMO, GTO and iannnnn-HEN: the same idea three times

The designer went back to this brief twice more, and both sequels are documented on the site in his own words. GMO is the middle of a twenty-year thread:

• iannnnnGTO, listed 18 September 2005, is described on its own page as ฟอนต์ภาคต่อจาก iannnnnGMO — a sequel to GMO — saluting the face “we know as Cordia”, and this time เบี้ยวบิดเละเทะกว่าเดิม, more warped and messier than before. It is tagged grunge where GMO is tagged fun. Same reference, opposite restraint. It had 508,250 downloads on 29 August 2026.
• iannnnn-HEN, from 2025, is named on the GMO page as GMO’s successor: มีการออกแบบใหม่ทั้งหมดตั้งแต่เริ่มยันจบ แต่ยังเหลือกลิ่นของ GMO อยู่นิดๆ แถมยังมีหลายน้ำหนักด้วย — redesigned start to finish, with a trace of GMO still in it, and this time with several weights. If you want the idea with a usable weight range and modern shaping, that is where to go.

One caution about the GTO page worth stating plainly: the designer there attributes Cordia’s design to ลุงทองเติม, “Uncle Thongterm”. Microsoft credits Unity Progress Corp, 1992, and names no individual designer. We report his phrasing as his; we do not repeat the attribution as fact. The related bundled variant is Cordia New, and the wider map of who draws Thai type is in Thai type foundries.

What to pair iannnnnGMO with, and where it fails

Use GMO where a friendly, slightly irregular Thai voice helps and where the line is short — it is a display face with one weight and no shaping, and it will not carry a document. It fits:

• Packaging and menu headlines for small food, café and craft brands
• Children’s material, school and community print, and anything wanting warmth without being cute
• Posters, social cards and titles up to a few lines
• Bilingual lockups where the Latin needs to feel drawn rather than set

Where it fails: long body text at small sizes, any interface, and any layout that needs a bold. There is no bold — and faking one by stroking the outline will fill those small round loops immediately. Set the running text in Sarabun or Anuphan and give GMO only the headline. For more faces in the same construction, browse looped Thai fonts.

Name variants and spellings

These all point at the same 2005 typeface, and searching any of them should land here:

• iannnnnGMO — the name in the file’s name table and on the release page
• 2005_iannnnnGMO — the family name inside the .ttf and the archive name
• iannnnn GMO, ianGMO, iannnGMO — spacing and n-count variants; the handle has exactly five n’s
• ฟอนต์ iannnnnGMO — the standard Thai query
• ฟอนต์ไอ้แอนนนนน — the designer’s handle written in Thai
• ฟอนต์ 2005 — the query for the whole series, which resolves at the iannnnn hub
• iannnnn-HEN, แม่ไก่ — the 2025 successor, a different font with a different file

There is no published explanation anywhere for what the three letters GMO stand for. The designer explains the naming of some fonts in this series and not this one, and we are not going to invent one.

Information verified as of August 2026