Thai font · FREE

TH Sarabun New

สารบรรณ

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · June 13, 2026 · Updated September 8, 2026

Information verified as of September 2026

อ่านหน้า ฟอนต์ TH Sarabun New เป็นภาษาไทย — พร้อมลิงก์ดาวน์โหลดและวิธีติดตั้ง →

What TH Sarabun New is

TH Sarabun New is the 2011 revision of TH Sarabun PSK, the looped Thai sans that Thailand’s Council of Ministers named a National Font on 7 September 2010, and it is a free download from f0nt.com under GPL 2.0 with a font exception. Suppakit Chalermlarp (ศุภกิจ เฉลิมลาภ) drew the original; SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property published the revision through f0nt.com on 19 August 2011. That one release page has logged 10,444,940 downloads, read on 22 August 2026.

The name is the job description. สารบรรณ (sarabun) means documentary affairs — the Thai civil-service term for correspondence and filing. This is a face built to set memos, forms and gazette pages, and nothing else.

The National Font project (ฟอนต์แห่งชาติ) released 13 typefaces carrying a TH prefix and ordered state agencies to stop using private-sector fonts by 5 December 2010, King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s 83rd birthday. Sarabun was the one singled out for official correspondence, displacing Angsana New, the Windows-bundled serif that had been the de facto standard. You can see the whole set on our National Fonts category page.

One correction worth making, because it circulates widely and this page previously carried it: the Government Gazette of Thailand (ราชกิจจานุเบกษา) has used TH Sarabun PSK since January 2011, not TH Sarabun New. Wikipedia’s National Fonts article names PSK explicitly as the Gazette face.

Version 1.35, dated 15 November 2019, is still the current release as of 22 August 2026. There has been no newer version in nearly seven years. We re-checked on 8 September 2026: the download counter had moved to 10,491,320 and the files inside the zip are still Version 1.35.

This is ThaiGraph’s hub page for the whole Sarabun family: TH Sarabun New, the 2007 original TH Sarabun PSK, the third-party IT๙ variant, the Google Fonts Sarabun, the 2010 cabinet resolution that made Sarabun “the government font”, and the Windows-update rendering bug people search for most. The Thai version is at TH Sarabun New (ภาษาไทย).

TH Sarabun New or TH Sarabun PSK — which one do I install?

Install both. Use TH Sarabun PSK whenever a template, form or regulation names it by name, which covers most Thai official work, and use TH Sarabun New when you need the freer licence or when Thai tone marks misbehave in Office on a Mac. The two files are the same typeface: beartai quoted Suppakit Chalermlarp saying that physically the appearance, the letterspacing and the line spacing are all identical, so a document set in one and reopened in the other does not reflow.

The full side-by-side comparison — what the 2011 revision actually changed, the SIPA statement that argues for standardising on PSK, and what to do with legacy files that already embed it — is on the sibling page for TH Sarabun PSK. The table read from the actual files is in the next section.

What is the difference between TH Sarabun PSK and TH Sarabun New?

The outlines, sidebearings and line spacing are identical. Three things genuinely differ: the family name embedded in the files (TH SarabunPSK versus TH Sarabun New), the 2011 fix for rendering on low-resolution screens, and the licence. We downloaded both official zips from f0nt.com on 8 September 2026 and read the font metadata directly with fontTools, so this table comes from the files rather than from hearsay.

When to use which. Use TH Sarabun PSK whenever the receiving side names it — official correspondence under the sarabun regulations, ministry templates and nearly every thesis template — and whenever the other machine runs Microsoft 365, which already has PSK without an install. Use TH Sarabun New when strokes render thin and faint on old low-resolution Windows screens, when tone marks float in Office on a Mac (1.35 was released for exactly that), or when you are redistributing the font files under the GPL. In every other case install both: the metrics are identical, so holding both names costs nothing and eliminates font substitution entirely.

The common misreading is “New is newer, so it is better”. f0nt.com never itemised the defects it fixed, and the SIPA statement relayed by NSTDA asks agencies to return to TH Sarabun PSK alone, because mixing the two forces re-layout every time a document changes hands. The third family, Sarabun on Google Fonts, is yet another set of files; the three-way comparison is below.

The 13 National Fonts and the cabinet resolution of 7 September 2010

On 7 September 2010 Thailand’s cabinet approved that every state agency install the sarabun font and the other twelve, thirteen fonts in all, from SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property, complete the rollout before 5 December 2010, and report completion to the ICT Ministry. That resolution is why Thais call this “the government font” (ฟอนต์ราชการ) and why TH Sarabun PSK has its special status. The proposal came from the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology as the “Thai Government Standard Font Project”. The stated rationale, as MODIFY reported it: ปัจจุบัน ส่วนราชการมีการใช้ฟอนต์อย่างหลากหลาย ไม่มีมาตรฐาน…การใช้มาตรฐานฟอนต์ของบริษัทเอกชนที่ผูกขาดลิขสิทธิ์อาจมีปัญหาเรื่องการฟ้องร้องละเมิดลิขสิทธิ์ได้ — agencies were using fonts inconsistently, and relying on proprietary fonts risked copyright litigation. The fonts pushed out were Angsana New, Browallia New, Cordia New and EucrosiaUPC.

A word on sourcing. The resolution wording above comes from Thai Library’s reproduction (13 September 2010), which links a 19-page scan; we downloaded it, but it is image-only with no text layer, so we could not extract the original. Nor did an open search find the item in the Cabinet Secretariat’s resolution database. Treat the wording as reproduced. The date, 7 September 2010, and the deadline, 5 December 2010, agree across every source we checked: Thai and English Wikipedia, Thai Library and MODIFY.

The thirteen, with designers as credited on f0nt.com’s release page (each in four styles — regular, italic, bold, bold italic):

Of the thirteen, only Sarabun was prescribed for official correspondence: Office of the Prime Minister circular นร 0106/ว 2019, as Thai Library reproduces it, specifies TH Sarabun PSK at 16 points. The other twelve are fonts agencies may use for other work without licensing worries. The whole set is on the National Fonts category page; f0nt.com distributes them as thirteen separate zips.

What is TH Sarabun IT๙, and should you use it?

TH Sarabun IT๙ is a third-party modification of TH Sarabun PSK that makes the Arabic digit keys 0–9 display as Thai numerals ๐–๙. It is not part of the National Font set, appears in no official proclamation, and SIPA has asked agencies to stop using it. SIPA’s statement, as relayed by NSTDA, is blunt: เลิกใช้ฟอนต์ TH Sarabun IT๙ เนื่องจากใช้วิธีแก้ไขตัวเลขไทยไม่ถูกต้องตามหลักการของ Unicode ทำให้เกิดปัญหาในการแลกเปลี่ยนเอกสาร — stop using it, because its Thai-numeral hack does not follow Unicode and breaks document exchange.

The mechanism is the problem. The font simply remaps the glyphs for Arabic digits to draw as Thai numerals. Data Revol puts it as “press 1, get ๑; press 2, get ๒”, but the character stored in the file is still 1 (U+0031), not ๑ (U+0E51). Searching, sorting and calculating on those values goes wrong, and the moment the font is changed or the file is opened on a machine without IT๙, every “Thai” numeral silently reverts to an Arabic one.

The misunderstanding traces back to a cabinet resolution of 2 May 2000 about using Buddhist Era years, which Thai Library notes was stretched into “all digits must be Thai”. Circular นร 0106/ว 2019 actually treats Thai numerals as promotional, not mandatory, and allows Arabic digits for financial, tabular or foreign-language work. The IT๙ bundles passed around teacher and school websites since late 2014 contain eight files — TH SarabunIT9 in four styles and TH NiramitIT๙ in four — with no maker named. The name is also a licence problem: the PSK licence reserves the Sarabun names and forbids adapted versions from carrying them.

If you need Thai numerals, type real ones — the Unicode characters U+0E50 to U+0E59 — from the Thai keyboard layout or your application’s numeral setting, and keep using TH Sarabun PSK or TH Sarabun New. Both already contain the Thai numeral glyphs, and the file will open correctly everywhere. If TH SarabunIT๙ is installed alongside PSK on your machine, RMUTSB’s IT office recommends removing it when you fix the Windows-update rendering bug described below.

TH Sarabun New vs TH Sarabun PSK vs Sarabun on Google Fonts

Three families share the Sarabun name, they are in the same design lineage, and none of them substitutes for the others in a font menu. A template that asks for “TH Sarabun PSK” is not satisfied by “Sarabun”, because a font-selection dialog matches the family name string, not the family tree.

• TH SarabunPSK — the 2007 original from the SIPA National Font set. Four cuts. The string written into Thai regulation and into most government and academic templates.
• TH Sarabun New — the 2011 revision. Four cuts. Same outlines as PSK, GPL 2.0 with font exception, and the version whose 1.35 release fixed Office for Mac.
• Sarabun — a later redraw published on Google Fonts, based on TH Sarabun New. The Google Fonts metadata records it as OFL, 16 variants across eight weights from 100 to 800, added on 28 October 2013, and maintained upstream by Cadson Demak — the Bangkok foundry where Suppakit Chalermlarp later worked. Latin, Latin Extended, Thai and Vietnamese subsets.

The practical division: Word and PDF work that has to match a Thai template takes TH SarabunPSK or TH Sarabun New. Web work takes Sarabun, which is packaged and hinted as a webfont and has the weight range to build a hierarchy. Loading a desktop TTF of TH Sarabun New over @font-face is legal under its licence, but you are shipping a document face with two weights when an eight-weight OFL family exists for the same job.

Is TH Sarabun New free to download?

Yes, and free for commercial work too. The f0nt.com release page states that SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property jointly revised the licence of this TH Sarabun font to GPL 2.0 with a font exception. The font exception is the part that matters day to day: it means a document that embeds the font is not itself pulled under the GPL. Embedding in PDFs and Word files, commercial use, and redistribution are all permitted.

Font Library lists the same family under the GNU General Public License in four TrueType styles, which is a second, independent statement of the licence for anyone who cannot read the Thai page.

One caution about scope. The GPL wording is published on the TH Sarabun New release page. The older TH SarabunPSK files were distributed royalty-free by SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property through f0nt.com, but do not assume the GPL statement reaches back to cover them — if you are redistributing files rather than just using them, redistribute New. For how Thai font licences differ from Latin ones in general, see our Thai font licensing guide.

How to download TH Sarabun New

The official source is the f0nt.com release page, which serves THSarabunNew.zip containing all four files at version 1.35. Two routes that are actually legitimate:

1. f0nt.com — the TH Sarabun New release page is the channel SIPA used to distribute the National Fonts. This is the page behind the search “โหลดฟอนต์ th sarabun”.
2. Font Library — the THSarabun New entry mirrors the four cuts under the GNU GPL for anyone who prefers an English-language source.

There is no Homebrew cask for this font. You will find brew install --cask font-th-sarabun-new quoted on other sites; it fails, because no such cask exists. Homebrew’s own API returns HTTP 404 for font-th-sarabun-new, checked 22 August 2026, and the pull request that proposed adding it was closed without being merged. On macOS, install the files by hand as described below.

Skip the ad-heavy font aggregators. They serve stale versions — and given that v1.35 is the release that fixes Office for Mac, an old copy is not a cosmetic problem. Check the version before you trust a mirror.

Download TH Sarabun New and TH Sarabun PSK from ThaiGraph (verified mirror)

ThaiGraph hosts both official f0nt.com zips on our own server. The files are byte-identical to the originals — nothing renamed, re-zipped or modified — and we publish the SHA-256 of every file so you can verify them. Two reasons for the mirror. f0nt.com refuses downloads that do not originate from its own pages (we received HTTP 403 fetching the file without a referer), so links forwarded by email or chat routinely fail. And the bundles other sites hand out often mix in stale versions or the IT๙ files.

All eight .ttf files sit in the same folder under their original names (THSarabunNew.ttf, THSarabunNew Bold.ttf, THSarabunNew Italic.ttf, THSarabunNew BoldItalic.ttf, THSarabun.ttf, THSarabun Bold.ttf, THSarabun Italic.ttf, THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf) for anyone who wants a single file, but the simplest route is the zip. Verify a download on Windows with certutil -hashfile THSarabunNew.zip SHA256 and on macOS with shasum -a 256 THSarabunNew.zip; the output must match the table character for character. If it does not, do not install.

The licence basis for the mirror: TH Sarabun New is GPL 2.0-or-later with a font-embedding exception, which permits redistribution outright, and we ship the full GPL text with the exception exactly as embedded in the fonts. TH Sarabun PSK ships with a “DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement” whose clause (1) reads “Allow to use without any charges and allow to reproduce, study, adapt and distribute this Font Computer Program”, forbidding only the sale of the font file on its own. We do not sell, modify or rename, so we are inside both. f0nt.com’s own release page tells readers to go by the licence attached to the font. f0nt.com remains the official source, and both release pages are linked in the previous section.

How to install TH Sarabun New on Windows

Unzip the download, select all four .ttf files, right-click, and choose Install for all users. Microsoft’s own instructions for adding a font run: download the files, which often come compressed in .zip folders; unzip by right-clicking the .zip folder and selecting Extract; then right-click the fonts you want and select Install, clicking Yes if Windows asks permission to make changes. Dragging the files into C:\Windows\Fonts does the same thing.

Windows 11 adds a wrinkle Microsoft’s article does not cover. The right-click menu is condensed, so “Install for all users” only appears after you click “Show more options” at the bottom of the menu, or press Shift+F10. That distinction matters on a shared office PC: “Install for all users” writes to C:\Windows\Fonts and every program and every account sees the font, while a plain “Install” — and the drag-and-drop area under Settings > Personalization > Fonts — installs for the current user only, and some programs will not see it.

Two things people get wrong here. Install all four files, not just the roman, or Word will synthesise a fake bold and a fake italic and your document will not match anyone else’s. And if the font does not appear in the font list, close and reopen the Office app; Office reads the font list at launch.

How to install TH Sarabun New on macOS

Double-click each .ttf in the Finder and click Install, or drag all four onto the Font Book window. Apple documents four routes, all current for macOS Tahoe 26 back to High Sierra: File > Add Fonts to Current User in Font Book then double-click the file; drag the file onto the Font Book icon in the Dock and click Install; drag the file into the Font Book window; or double-click the file in the Finder and click Install. TrueType .ttf, which is what TH Sarabun New ships as, is on Apple’s supported-format list.

The step worth adding for Thai users is validation. In Font Book, select the font and choose File > Validate Selection, or File > Validate File and browse to it. Green means passed, yellow is a warning, red is a failure. This is how you catch a duplicate or damaged TH Sarabun install, which is the single most common cause of the tone-mark bug below.

There is no package-manager shortcut on macOS. Do not trust the brew install --cask font-th-sarabun-new line that circulates on other sites — that cask does not exist and the command fails.

Thai tone marks floating in Word and PowerPoint on macOS

If your Thai tone marks sit above the wrong consonant in Office on macOS Tahoe, update macOS to 26.1 or later and replace your TH Sarabun New with version 1.35 from f0nt.com. A Microsoft Q&A thread running from 17 September 2025 to 8 January 2026 records the bug appearing after the Tahoe update, macOS 26.1 clearing it in Word but not in PowerPoint, and version 1.35 removing it on Tahoe 26.2.

That is not a coincidence: the f0nt.com update note of 15 November 2019 says Suppakit Chalermlarp released 1.35 specifically to fix Thai-language problems in Microsoft Office for Mac. The full thread-by-thread record, including the fixes that were reported not to work and the Font Book steps that clear the duplicate installs behind most reports, is on the TH Sarabun PSK page.

Why TH Sarabun PSK breaks after a Windows 10/11 update, and how to fix it

The symptom: after the October 2023 Windows updates, text set in TH Sarabun PSK in Excel (and on some machines Word) shows in another font or with distorted glyphs. The fix that Thai university IT departments converged on is to remove TH SarabunPSK completely through Control Panel and reinstall all four files with “Install for all users”. This mostly hits PSK, and it is the top reason Thais search for “TH Sarabun PSK เพี้ยน” (broken).

The clearest public record of the cause is a Microsoft Q&A thread of 12 October 2023. The poster names two updates installed just before the breakage — KB5031354 (2023-10 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 22H2) and KB5031323 (that month’s .NET Framework update) — with Thai characters in Excel rendering as if swapped for Tahoma. A 19 October 2023 answer proposes uninstalling KB5031354 from Update history as a temporary workaround. We do not recommend that: it is a security update, and other respondents in the same thread report it did not work for them.

The method published by KMUTNB’s Instrumentation and Electrical Energy Engineering department and by RMUTSB’s Academic Resources office is the same, and it is what government offices across Thailand use. Three steps:

1. Remove the old font completely. Open Control Panel, switch the view to Large icons or Small icons, click Fonts, type sarabun in the search box, select TH SarabunPSK and press Delete, then Yes. If TH SarabunIT๙ is present, delete it too. If Windows warns the file is in use, close every Word, Excel, PowerPoint and browser window and retry.
2. Reinstall all four files. Extract the zip, select the four .ttf files, right-click, choose Show more options, then Install for all users — on Windows 11 that command is hidden in the second-level menu. This writes to C:\Windows\Fonts, so every account and every program sees the same font.
3. Reopen Office. Office reads the font list at launch. Existing documents render correctly again without editing, because the font name in them never changed.

One thing to say plainly. Both university pages hand out a file called Fonts_TH_SarabunPSK_version_1.000.zip and recommend “version 1.000”, yet the official f0nt.com archive (and our mirror above) embeds Version 1.1 2006. We could not trace where the 1.000 build comes from or verify how it differs from 1.1. Our advice is the official set with published hashes. What every source agrees actually clears the fault is the complete removal and complete reinstall, not the version number.

A similar-looking case with a different cause: Blognone recorded in October 2019 that after the Windows 10 1903 update “Sarabun New started misbehaving — in Word it turned into another font”. The culprit was an incomplete font file; installing the complete file over it ended the problem. That is another reason to check the hash of what you downloaded before installing. Floating tone marks on macOS are a separate issue, covered in the previous section.

TH Sarabun in Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Canva

Word under a Microsoft 365 subscription has TH SarabunPSK in all four styles as a cloud font, no install needed. Google Docs has Sarabun — the Google Fonts version — but neither TH Sarabun PSK nor TH Sarabun New. Microsoft’s Cloud fonts in Office page lists “TH SarabunPSK”, “TH SarabunPSK Bold”, “TH SarabunPSK Bold Italic” and “TH SarabunPSK Italic”, and explains that “Cloud fonts are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers”. That is Microsoft’s own documentation confirming the 2018 Blognone report that an earlier version of this page said we could not find. Two limits: cloud fonts download on first use and need a connection, and perpetual Office (2019, 2021, 2024) does not receive them, so those machines need the files installed by hand as above. TH Sarabun New is not a cloud font anywhere; every machine installs it manually.

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides draw only from the Google Fonts library. On 7 February 2019 Google announced the Thai National Fonts in their Google Fonts editions — Bai Jamjuree, Chakra Petch, Charm, Charmonman, Fah Kwang, K2D, KoHo, Kodchasan, Krub, Mali, Niramit, Sarabun and Srisakdi — in the More fonts menu. All of them are Cadson Demak’s OFL redraws, not the original TH files. We checked the complete Google Fonts family list: there is no “TH Sarabun PSK” or “TH Sarabun New”. So a template that names TH Sarabun PSK cannot be satisfied inside Docs. The workaround is to draft in Docs with Sarabun, download as .docx, and set the font to TH Sarabun PSK in Word before submitting; the two families are not metric-compatible, so recheck pagination.

Canva: we found no Canva-published list of its Thai fonts, so we do not claim whether Sarabun is available there. Search the font panel for “Sarabun”; if the job requires the name TH Sarabun PSK, produce it in a word processor, since Canva is a graphics tool rather than an official-correspondence tool. On phones, neither iOS nor Android lets a downloaded .ttf become a system font; what you can do is in how to install a Thai font on your phone.

Every file in the TH Sarabun New family

TH Sarabun New ships four TrueType files: two weights, Regular and Bold, each with a true italic. Font Library lists exactly those four styles — Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic — under the GNU GPL. A community GitHub mirror of the SIPA set, epsilonxe/SIPAFonts, carries them under these filenames:

That is the whole family — there is no Light, no Medium, no display cut, and no variable version. TH SarabunPSK has the same four-cut structure.

One caveat on the filenames. SIPA publishes no manifest of what is inside the official zip, so the names above come from a community mirror rather than from the distributor. The four styles are independently confirmed by Font Library; the exact filenames are not, and should be read as indicative.

Update, 8 September 2026: that caveat is now closed. We downloaded THSarabunNew.zip from f0nt.com directly and opened it. The official set contains exactly the files in the table — THSarabunNew.ttf, THSarabunNew Bold.ttf, THSarabunNew Italic.ttf, THSarabunNew BoldItalic.ttf — all dated 15 November 2019 and all embedding “Version 1.35 2011”. The zip also carries a __MACOSX folder with four 210-byte macOS resource files, which are not fonts and can be deleted. The official PSK set, by contrast, uses THSarabun.ttf, THSarabun Bold.ttf, THSarabun Italic.ttf and THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf, not the names the community mirror uses. SHA-256 values for every file are in the README of our mirror.

Note the filenames have no space after “TH”: the family is THSarabunNew in the file, even though it displays as “TH Sarabun New”.

If you need a Thai family with a real weight range — for a hierarchy rather than a memo — the eight-weight Sarabun on Google Fonts is the same lineage, and Noto Sans Thai or IBM Plex Sans Thai offer wider systems. Compare them against your own text in the Thai font tester.

What Thai government templates actually require

Thai official-document rules name the string “TH Sarabun PSK”, not “TH Sarabun New”. Thai Library reproduces the Office of the Prime Minister circular นร 0106/ว 2019, “คำอธิบายการพิมพ์หนังสือราชการภาษาไทยด้วยโปรแกรมการพิมพ์ในเครื่องคอมพิวเตอร์”, as specifying TH Sarabun PSK at 16 points for typing Thai official documents. We have not been able to read the circular PDF itself — every Thai government host we tried either blocked the request or served an image-only scan — so treat the 16-point figure as reproduced by Thai Library rather than read at source.

The mechanism is worth understanding because it explains why “just install New, it’s newer” is bad advice. A Word template stores a font by its exact family name. Open a template that specifies TH SarabunPSK on a machine that only has TH Sarabun New and Word does not quietly swap in the near-identical sibling — it falls back to whatever it likes, and your line breaks move. Since the two files are metrically identical, having both installed costs you nothing and removes the failure entirely.

That is also why the SIPA statement relayed by NSTDA asks agencies to standardise on PSK: not because New is worse, but because a ministry that receives documents in a mix of the two spends its day re-laying-out pages. If you are producing documents for a Thai ministry, a state enterprise, or an academic office, set them in whatever the template names, and do not upgrade the font as a favour.

Name variants and spellings

This one typeface is searched for under at least a dozen names, and two of the commonest Thai spellings are misspellings. All of the following point at the same family or its immediate sibling:

• TH Sarabun New — the display name. Written THSarabunNew inside the files.
• TH Sarabun — the family name without the version; ambiguous between PSK and New.
• TH SarabunPSK / TH Sarabun PSK / THSarabunPSK — the 2007 original. Note the official string has no space before PSK.
• Thai Sarabun font / font Thai Sarabun / Thai Sarabun PSK — the English word order most non-Thai searchers reach for.
• ฟอนต์สารบรรณ — the correct Thai spelling. สารบรรณ means documentary affairs.
• ฟอนต์ไทยสารบัญ — a very common misspelling. สารบัญ means table of contents, not documentary affairs; the two words differ by one syllable and Thai keyboards do not object. People typing it are looking for this font.
• ฟร้อน thai sarabun psk — ฟร้อน is a widespread phonetic misspelling of ฟอนต์. Same font.
• โหลดฟอนต์ th sarabun — the Thai phrasing of “download TH Sarabun”.
• Sarabun — on its own, this usually means the Google Fonts family, which is a different set of files.

What does the “PSK” in TH SarabunPSK stand for? No published source we could find says. We checked the English and Thai Wikipedia articles on the National Fonts, both f0nt.com release pages — the distributor’s own — the MATTER’s origin piece on the typeface, and the Thai Linux Working Group archives. None of them expands the initials. Anyone telling you confidently what PSK means is guessing, and so would we be.

Character design and tone

TH Sarabun New is a looped (มีหัว) humanist sans with near-monolinear strokes, clear circular consonant heads, and generous counters. The following is our own reading of the letterforms rather than an attributed claim — the designer’s specimen notes are not reachable online.

The loops on ก, ถ and ภ stay open at 14–16pt, which is where Thai official documents set their body text, so the face survives laser printing and photocopying without the loops filling in. Against Angsana New, the serif it displaced, it drops the stroke contrast and the dated terminal detailing and reads cleaner at the same size.

The tone is deliberate bureaucratic neutrality. It expresses nothing, which for a form, a memo or a gazette page is the entire job. The Latin companion is a plain humanist sans sized to sit evenly with the Thai, so bilingual documents — visa forms, transcripts, ministry letterheads — hold a consistent texture across both scripts. More on setting Thai body text in our typography guide.

Best use cases

TH Sarabun New is the correct choice whenever a document must match Thai government conventions and you are free to choose between the two Sarabun files. Strong briefs:

• Official correspondence, memos and reports where the template does not hard-code a font name
• University theses and coursework where the template says “TH Sarabun” without specifying PSK
• Anything you will redistribute with the font embedded, where GPL 2.0 with font exception is the cleaner ground
• Documents produced in Office on macOS, where v1.35 is the release that renders Thai correctly

Where it does not fit: templates that name TH Sarabun PSK explicitly — use that file instead — plus branding and display work, which two weights cannot carry, and web projects, where Sarabun is the packaged equivalent.

Free alternatives and neighbours

Every alternative worth naming here is also free, because the National Font set and the Google Fonts Thai library between them cover most document work at no cost. Four directions:

• TH Sarabun PSK — not an alternative so much as the other half. Same outlines, the name templates ask for.
• Sarabun — the OFL Google Fonts redraw, eight weights, the right answer for the web.
• Noto Sans Thai — broader coverage and a full weight system for interface work.
• IBM Plex Sans Thai — a corporate-neutral looped alternative with a matching Latin.

The other twelve National Fonts sit on the National Fonts category page, and the wider set of no-cost Thai families is under free Thai fonts. For the looped register specifically — the มีหัว letterform family Sarabun belongs to — see looped Thai fonts.

Pairings

TH Sarabun New rarely needs a pairing, because Thai official documents set everything in one face, but mixed workflows have three natural partners.

• Angsana New — the legacy serif, still present in older templates that mix both
• Sarabun — the web counterpart from the same lineage, for sites that mirror printed documents
• Noto Sans Thai — fallback-stack insurance for screens where neither is installed

Licensing

TH Sarabun New is free software under GPL 2.0 with a font exception: documents that embed the font are not themselves covered by the GPL. The f0nt.com release page states that SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property jointly revised the licence of this TH Sarabun font to those terms, so commercial use, redistribution, and embedding in PDFs and Word files are all permitted. Font Library independently records the family under the GNU General Public License and credits the foundry as “Mr.Suppakit Chalermlarp, RSAD.Design LTD.”

Two practical notes. If you redistribute the font files themselves — inside a template pack, an app, or a client handoff — ship TH Sarabun New rather than the older PSK files, because the GPL statement is published on the New release. And if your project needs an SIL Open Font Licence specifically, which some corporate legal teams insist on, use Sarabun from Google Fonts instead; it is OFL, and it is the same design lineage. The Thai font licensing guide sets out how the two licences differ in practice.

What the files actually embed (checked 8 September 2026). All four TH Sarabun New files carry the licence in their own name table. It opens “This font is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.” and closes with the embedding exception: “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.” Note “or any later version”, which is broader than the “GPL 2.0” summary on f0nt.com. The zip has no separate licence file, so this embedded text is the licence that travels with the files; we reproduce it with the full GPL text in the mirror’s licence file.

The caution above about not assuming the GPL reaches back to the 2007 PSK files still stands, but we have now read PSK’s actual licence. The PSK zip ships “DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement.txt”, dated 21 September 2006, in Thai and English. In substance: (1) free use, copying, study, adaptation and distribution, but the font file may not be sold on its own, original or adapted, except bundled with a computer program; (2) anyone adapting it must notify the Department of Intellectual Property and SIPA in writing; (3) adapted versions may not use the reserved names, which include all four TH Sarabun PSK styles, nor the owners’ or designer’s names in promotion; (4) adapted versions stay under the same licence. That is the origin of the 2010 Thai Linux mailing-list complaint that a modified version “cannot keep the original name”, and it is why TH Sarabun IT๙ — adapted from PSK yet still carrying Sarabun in its name — is a licence problem as well as a technical one. For anyone who simply types documents, embeds PDFs or shares files, both PSK and New are fully usable with no further conditions.

Information verified as of September 2026