Thai font · OFL

Kodchasan

คชสาร

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · June 13, 2026

Information verified as of June 2026

What Kodchasan is

Kodchasan (คชสาร) is a casual looped Thai family modelled on teenage handwriting, designed by Kansuda Peamprajakpong and distributed free on Google Fonts in six weights with matching italics. It began life as TH Kodchasan, one of Thailand’s 13 national fonts.

The history runs deeper than most free Thai fonts. In 2007, Thailand’s Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA) released 13 free fonts for public and government use — the project that also produced TH Sarabun, ancestor of today’s Sarabun. TH Kodchasan was the casual one in that batch. Cadson Demak later prepared the family for Google Fonts, where it landed on 22 August 2018 with a full six-weight range.

The project description sets the tone honestly: the face “gives a flavor of cuteness but yet not too fun or being funny”. It is handwriting that has been to school — controlled, legible, a little soft.

Character design and tone

Kodchasan keeps the full looped structure of formal Thai writing but rounds and relaxes it, the way a teenager’s neat notebook hand rounds a textbook model. Looped heads on ม, ภ, and บ stay closed and circular; strokes are monolinear and gently bouncy rather than ruler-straight.

The Cadson Demak repository describes “a little flare of feminist handwriting” that makes the face “more gentle and soft spoken”, and that reads accurately on the page: terminals curl slightly, counters are generous, and nothing is sharp. Compared with Itim, Kodchasan is more disciplined — closer to careful homework than to a marker doodle. Compared with Sriracha, it is less stylised and easier to read in running text.

The Latin matches the rounded, hand-drawn register, so bilingual children’s material keeps one voice across scripts.

Weights and availability

Kodchasan ships six weights — ExtraLight (200), Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, and Bold (700) — and every weight has a true italic, for twelve styles in total. Coverage spans Thai, Latin, Latin Extended, and Vietnamese.

Twelve styles is a generous range for a handwriting-flavoured face, and the italics give editorial designers an emphasis style inside the family rather than forcing a second font. There is no variable-font build, so each weight loads as its own file.

How to download Kodchasan

Kodchasan is a free download from Google Fonts: one family ZIP containing all six weights and six italics. No registration, no payment.

1. Google Fonts ZIP — open the Kodchasan specimen, click “Get font”, and download the family ZIP.
2. CSS embed — load https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Kodchasan:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400&display=swap in a <link> tag (add weight pairs as needed), then set font-family: 'Kodchasan', sans-serif;.
3. GitHub source — the cadsondemak/Kodchasan repository carries the project files under OFL-1.1.

Best use cases

Kodchasan fits content aimed at children and teenagers, and any brand that wants approachable Thai without losing legibility. Strong briefs:

• School materials, workbooks, and educational apps for Thai students
• Snack, dessert, and bubble-tea packaging in a cute-but-tidy register
• Youth campaigns, summer camps, and after-school programmes
• Comics lettering and casual social graphics where Itim feels too loose

Where it fails: corporate identity, legal or government documents, and luxury anything. The handwriting flavour caps the formality ceiling — a CFO’s annual report set in Kodchasan reads as a joke. Long body text past a few paragraphs also tires; the bounce that charms in a headline accumulates on a full page.

Pairings

Kodchasan works best as the personality layer over a plain text family. Three combinations:

• Sarabun — its SIPA sibling as the neutral body under Kodchasan headings; see Sarabun
• Noto Sans Thai — the safe body choice for apps and e-learning interfaces; see Noto Sans Thai
• Kodchasan with itself — Bold headings, Regular body, Italic captions; few free Thai families can run a whole children’s book alone, and this one can

The Thai typography guide covers when a handwritten face can carry body text.

Licensing

Kodchasan is released under the SIL Open Font License: free for commercial use, modification, and embedding, with the OFL notice kept alongside the files. That covers packaging runs, apps, and printed schoolbooks alike. Verify at the Google Fonts specimen or the GitHub repository. The 2007 SIPA originals remain separately downloadable, but the Google Fonts build is the maintained version.

Information verified as of June 2026