Thai font · OFL

Maitree

ไมตรี

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · June 13, 2026

Information verified as of June 2026

What Maitree is

Maitree is a looped Thai serif by Cadson Demak with wide proportions and bigger-than-usual loop terminals, released on Google Fonts in 2016 in six weights under the SIL Open Font License. The name means “friendliness” in Thai (ไมตรี).

The brief was screen-first. Cadson Demak’s own documentation states the wide proportion was designed so the face “can fit on a device with a variety of screen and form factors.” That puts Maitree in a different lane from the foundry’s other looped serifs: Pridi and Taviraj were drawn with the printed page in mind, Maitree with the tablet. The Latin companion carries long serifs sized to balance the oversized Thai loops, so bilingual paragraphs hold an even texture.

The tone the foundry targets is “antique and historical manner” — old-world warmth, delivered through a structure that survives low-resolution rendering.

Character design and tone

Maitree’s defining features are loop terminals drawn larger than Thai convention, asymmetrically curved terminals, and a wide body that gives each glyph room at small screen sizes. The big loops on ก, ถ, and ภ read clearly at 14px where finer serifs muddy.

One caution comes from the foundry itself. The glyph groups ก ถ ภ ฤ ฦ, ฎ ฏ, บ ป, and ข ช sit close together in this design and can be confused in very short settings — a one-word headline, a two-character label. Running text disambiguates through context; isolated display setting does not. Cadson Demak also notes that vowel and tone mark sizes and positions were managed with particular care, since these drive Thai readability and the overall texture of the page.

The result is warmer than Pridi and less formal than Trirong. Maitree is the looped serif that smiles.

Weights and availability

Maitree ships six weights — ExtraLight (200), Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), SemiBold (600), and Bold (700) — in upright cuts only. No italics exist. Subsets cover Latin, Latin Extended, Thai, and Vietnamese.

The family entered Google Fonts on 20 June 2016, part of Cadson Demak’s run of Thai families for the platform. Source files in Glyphs format live in the public repository, so the typeface can be modified and rebuilt under the OFL.

How to download Maitree

Maitree is a free download from Google Fonts — the family ZIP contains all six static TTF weights, no registration required. Three routes:

1. Google Fonts ZIP — open the Maitree specimen, click “Get font”, and download the family.
2. CSS embed — load https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Maitree:wght@200;300;400;500;600;700&display=swap in a <link> tag, then set font-family: 'Maitree', serif;. Trim the weight list to the two or three weights actually used; each static weight is a separate file.
3. GitHub source — the cadsondemak/maitree repository holds TTF, OTF, and the .glyphs sources.

Best use cases

Maitree fits projects that want looped-serif warmth on screens: cultural publishing, heritage brands, and long-form Thai reading on devices. Strong briefs:

• Museum and cultural-institution websites where the content is historical
• Long-form Thai editorial read on tablets and phones
• Bilingual Thai-English publications — the long-serif Latin keeps mixed lines even
• Food, craft, and hospitality brands that want antique warmth without a script face

Where it fails: single-word display work at small sizes, because of the glyph-similarity groups the foundry documents; interface labels and data tables, where a loopless sans such as Kanit is the safer instrument; and any brief that needs an italic, since Maitree has none.

Pairings

Maitree carries body and headline duty; pair it with a loopless sans for navigation and captions. Three pairings:

• Kanit — geometric loopless sans for UI chrome and captions over Maitree body
• Prompt — rounder loopless sans when the brand voice is friendly rather than technical
• Sarabun — neutral workhorse for forms and footnotes beneath Maitree headlines

Layout guidance for serif-plus-sans systems is in the typography guide.

Licensing

Maitree is released under the SIL Open Font License — free for commercial use, web embedding, modification, and bundling, provided the OFL notice travels with the files. Copyright sits with Cadson Demak, 2015. Verify at the Google Fonts specimen or the GitHub repository. No paid tier, no usage reporting, no separate webfont licence.

Information verified as of June 2026