Thai font · FREE

TH Sarabun PSK

สารบรรณ

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · July 16, 2026 · Updated September 8, 2026

Information verified as of September 2026

อ่านหน้า ฟอนต์ TH Sarabun PSK เป็นภาษาไทย — พร้อมลิงก์ดาวน์โหลดและวิธีติดตั้ง →

What TH Sarabun PSK is

TH Sarabun PSK is the original looped Thai text font that Thailand’s government adopted as its document standard: published free on f0nt.com on 28 June 2007, designed by Suppakit Chalermlarp, and named by the Council of Ministers on 7 September 2010 as the font state agencies must use in their papers. It is one of the thirteen National Fonts (ฟอนต์แห่งชาติ) released by SIPA with the Department of Intellectual Property.

The 2010 resolution was not a recommendation. Agencies were ordered to stop using private-sector fonts by 5 December 2010, and the fonts being pushed out were named: Microsoft’s Angsana New, Browallia New, Cordia New and EucrosiaUPC. The name itself explains the brief. สารบรรณ means documentary affairs.

Two things follow from that history, and they are the reason this page exists. The Government Gazette (ราชกิจจานุเบกษา) has been set in TH Sarabun PSK since January 2011, starting with volume 128, part 1 A of 7 January 2011. And the string written into Thai regulations, ministry templates and university thesis forms is “TH Sarabun PSK”, not the name of the later revision. See /learn/typography/ for how Thai document conventions settled into their current shape.

This page stays on PSK: download, install, the Windows-update rendering bug, and what separates PSK from its successor. Everything that concerns the Sarabun family as a whole — the thirteen National Fonts and the 2010 cabinet resolution, the TH Sarabun IT๙ variant, Google Docs and Canva, and the detailed three-way comparison — lives on our hub page for TH Sarabun New. The Thai version of this page is at TH Sarabun PSK (ภาษาไทย).

Is TH Sarabun PSK free to download?

Yes. TH Sarabun PSK is free. SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property released all thirteen National Fonts at no cost through f0nt.com, and the TH Sarabun PSK release page there had logged over 2.6 million downloads as of 22 August 2026. There is no paid tier, no trial, and no reason to buy it from anyone.

Free is not the same as unrestricted, and this is where PSK and its successor genuinely differ. The 2007 PSK files were distributed under SIPA’s own terms rather than a standard free-software licence. In September 2010, on the Thai Linux Working Group developer list, a contributor writing as “wd” noted that SarabunPSK’s metrics sat close to the Windows fonts but that its licence was a problem, because once you modified the font you could not keep the original name, which held back wider distribution.

That is the restriction SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property removed in 2011. f0nt.com states plainly that the two agencies rewrote the licence to GPL 2.0 with a font exception เพื่อให้เป็นฟอนต์ที่เสรียิ่งขึ้น — to make it a freer font. That relicensing shipped attached to TH Sarabun New. Our Thai font licensing guide works through what each licence actually permits.

Every TH Sarabun PSK weight

TH Sarabun PSK ships four cuts: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. There is no Light, no Medium, no Black and no display cut. The National Fonts were commissioned as document faces, so two weights with a slope each was the whole specification.

A community mirror of the PSK files on GitHub confirms the same four-file structure — a roman, an italic, a bold and a bold italic. We are not publishing the official zip’s internal filenames, because SIPA’s own package contents are not documented anywhere we could verify, and the mirror is not an official distribution.

Update, 8 September 2026: we downloaded 07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip from f0nt.com directly and opened it. The official set holds five files: THSarabun.ttf, THSarabun Bold.ttf, THSarabun Italic.ttf, THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf (all dated 2 October 2006) and DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement.txt. Note that the filenames carry no “PSK”; the family name embedded in the files is TH SarabunPSK (no space before PSK) and the embedded version is “Version 1.1 2006”. The THSarabunPSK Regular.ttf-style names used by the community mirror are therefore renamings, not the originals. SHA-256 values for every file are in the download section below.

For comparison, TH Sarabun New has the same four-style structure: Font Library lists it under the GNU GPL in Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic. Same structure, different family name. Browse the rest of the set under National Fonts, or the full Thai font directory.

What does “PSK” stand for?

No published source we could find explains what the letters PSK mean. We checked the English and Thai Wikipedia articles on the National Fonts, the f0nt.com release page for the thirteen SIPA fonts, and the f0nt.com release page for TH Sarabun New. None of them defines the acronym, including the distributor that published the font.

This matters more than it looks. The suffix is the only thing separating two font names that behave differently inside a template, so people reasonably assume it must mean something specific. It may well be an internal identifier from the 2007 competition entry. We are not going to guess, and you should treat any page that confidently expands PSK into three words as unsourced until it shows you where the expansion came from.

What the letters do reliably tell you is which file you have. “TH Sarabun PSK” is the 2007 original. “TH Sarabun New” is the 2011 revision. “Sarabun” with no prefix is the later Google Fonts redraw. A font menu treats all three as unrelated families.

TH Sarabun PSK vs TH Sarabun New

Install both, and pick by job: use TH Sarabun PSK whenever a template, form or regulation names it, and TH Sarabun New when you need the freer GPL licence or you are fighting the Thai rendering bugs in Office on macOS. The common advice to simply replace PSK with New is not supported by the sources.

Start with what is actually different. Suppakit Chalermlarp, quoted by beartai in 2016, said the revision improved display sharpness at small sizes but that physically the font is entirely the same: ไม่ว่าจะเป็นหน้าตา ช่องไฟ ระยะบรรทัดฯ ทุกอย่างเหมือนกันทั้งหมด — appearance, sidebearings and line spacing all identical. The drawings did not change. The screen rendering did.

That rendering fix had a specific target. An NSTDA government publication relaying a SIPA statement describes TH Sarabun New as the answer to text coming out thin and faint on genuine Windows XP. The same publication says that for official documents under the Office of the Prime Minister’s Sarabun regulations only TH Sarabun PSK is permitted, and asks agencies to กลับมาใช้ฟอนต์ TH Sarabun PSK เพียงฟอนต์เดียว — return to TH Sarabun PSK alone. Its stated reason is practical: when agencies mix the two, documents have to be re-laid out every time they change hands.

One more practical asymmetry. Blognone reported in July 2018, quoting a Microsoft press statement, that Thai Sarabun PSK had become available in Office 365. We could not find a Microsoft-published page confirming that today, so treat it as a 2018 press claim rather than current Microsoft documentation. If it holds, it means the PSK name resolves on a stock Office install where the New name may not.

Update, 8 September 2026: found. Microsoft’s own Cloud fonts in Office page lists “TH SarabunPSK”, “TH SarabunPSK Bold”, “TH SarabunPSK Bold Italic” and “TH SarabunPSK Italic” among its cloud fonts and explains that “Cloud fonts are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers”. The 2018 report is therefore confirmed by Microsoft documentation. In practice, Microsoft 365 users can pick TH SarabunPSK without installing anything (it downloads on first use); perpetual Office, and TH Sarabun New on every machine, still need the files installed by hand.

What breaks if you swap PSK for New in an existing document

Nothing reflows. The two fonts share outlines, sidebearings and line spacing, so line breaks, page counts and pagination survive the swap intact. What breaks is name matching. That distinction is the whole risk profile.

Because the metrics are identical, replacing TH Sarabun PSK with TH Sarabun New inside a document will not shift a single line break. This is unusual and worth knowing. Substituting almost any other Thai font into a government template will move text across pages and break a signature block onto its own sheet.

The failures are all about the string “TH Sarabun PSK”:

• A template, style or form field that specifies TH Sarabun PSK by name will not match a document set in TH Sarabun New. It is a different family name, not a different style of the same family.
• A submission checked against a regulation that names TH Sarabun PSK can be rejected on the font name alone, regardless of how the page looks.
• On a machine that has only one of the two installed, opening the other file triggers a font substitution, and the substitute may not be metric-compatible at all.
• A PDF exported with New embedded is not identifiable as PSK by anyone auditing the file’s fonts.

The safe pattern for anyone working with Thai institutions: install both families, set the document in whichever one the receiving side names, and never rely on the assumption that an application will silently treat PSK and New as interchangeable. It will not.

How to download and install TH Sarabun PSK

Download TH Sarabun PSK from the f0nt.com release page for the thirteen SIPA National Fonts, unzip it, and install all four cuts rather than just the roman. f0nt.com is the channel SIPA used to distribute the set; the ad-heavy font aggregators carry older files and there is nothing to gain from them. If the f0nt.com link will not open — the site refuses direct downloads that do not come through its own pages — use ThaiGraph’s mirror in the section “Download the original TH Sarabun PSK files from ThaiGraph” below, which is the same file byte for byte, with published hashes.

On Windows, Microsoft’s documented route is: download the font files, which usually arrive compressed in .zip folders; right-click the .zip folder and select Extract; right-click the fonts you want and select Install; and if you are prompted to allow the program to make changes to your computer, and you trust the source, click Yes. Microsoft also documents dragging the files into C:\Windows\Fonts, where Windows installs them automatically. Close and reopen Word afterwards so it re-reads the font list, then set 16pt.

The detailed Windows 11 route, which is where most people get stuck:

1. Extract 07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip. You get four .ttf files (THSarabun.ttf, THSarabun Bold.ttf, THSarabun Italic.ttf, THSarabun Bold Italic.ttf) and one licence text file.
2. Click the first .ttf, hold Shift and click the last, so all four are selected.
3. Right-click, choose Show more options (or press Shift+F10), then Install for all users. The command is hidden in Windows 11’s second-level menu, and it is the right one for an office PC: it writes to C:\Windows\Fonts, so every account and every program sees the same font. Plain “Install” is per-user, and some programs will not see it.
4. Close every Word, Excel and PowerPoint window and reopen. Office reads the font list at launch.
5. Check that the font list shows “TH SarabunPSK” and that pressing Bold uses the real Bold file rather than a synthesised one. If bold looks unusually heavy or blurred, not all four files went in.

On macOS, Apple documents four routes in Font Book: File > Add Fonts to Current User and 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. macOS supports TrueType, which is what TH Sarabun ships. Apple’s article covers macOS Tahoe 26 back to High Sierra.

On a phone, none of the above applies: neither iOS nor stock Android lets a .ttf you downloaded become a system font, and what you can actually do is documented in how to install a Thai font on your phone.

If a Thai font misbehaves after installing, run Font Book’s File > Validate Selection first. A green icon means the font passed, yellow is a warning and red is a failure. Duplicate or corrupt installs are the usual cause, and validation finds them before you start blaming the application.

Download the original TH Sarabun PSK files from ThaiGraph

ThaiGraph hosts f0nt.com’s 07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip on our own server. The file is byte-identical to the original — nothing renamed or modified — and we publish the SHA-256 of every file so you can verify it. The licence shipped inside the zip permits this: clause (1) allows anyone 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 or modify it, and the original licence file travels with it.

The four .ttf files are in the same folder under their original names, but the simplest route is the zip. Verify on Windows with certutil -hashfile 07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip SHA256 and on macOS with shasum -a 256 07-TH-Sarabun-PSK.zip; if the output does not match the table, do not install. The TH Sarabun New 1.35 set is in the same folder and documented on that 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) turns into another font or shows distorted glyphs. The fix 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 is the most-searched question about PSK, and it is a PSK-specific problem.

The clearest public record of the cause is a Microsoft Q&A thread of 12 October 2023. The poster names the 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, in three steps:

1. Remove the old font completely. Open Control Panel, switch to Large icons or Small icons, click Fonts, type sarabun in the search box, select TH SarabunPSK, press Delete, then Yes. If TH SarabunIT๙ is present, delete it too — SIPA has asked agencies to stop using it, and it often compounds the problem. If Windows warns the file is in use, close every Word, Excel, PowerPoint and browser window and retry.
2. Reinstall all four files following the Windows 11 steps in the previous section: select all four, right-click, Show more options, Install for all users.
3. Reopen Office. Existing documents render correctly again without editing, because the font name stored 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 one more reason to check the hash before installing. Floating tone marks on macOS are a separate issue, covered next.

Fixing floating Thai tone marks in Office on macOS

If tone marks float above the wrong consonant in Word or PowerPoint on macOS, this is a known and partly unresolved problem, and TH Sarabun New version 1.35 is currently the file that works. It is the strongest practical argument for keeping New installed alongside PSK.

The record on Microsoft Q&A is specific. On 17 September 2025 a user on Office 2024 reported that TH Sarabun New tone marks began floating (วรรณยุกต์ลอย) immediately after updating to macOS Tahoe, with no Thai font problems before the update. On 26 September 2025 the same user reported that macOS 26.1 beta fixed the problem in Word but that PowerPoint was still broken. On 8 January 2026 another user reported that switching to TH Sarabun New version 1.35 from f0nt.com removed the problem on macOS Tahoe 26.2.

Version 1.35, dated 15 November 2019, was itself released to fix Thai-language problems in Microsoft Office for Mac, which is why it is the file that resolves this. There is no equivalent updated release of TH Sarabun PSK. In order: update macOS, install TH Sarabun New 1.35 from f0nt.com, validate your fonts in Font Book to clear duplicates, and expect PowerPoint to lag behind Word.

The web version, and free alternatives

For anything rendered in a browser, do not use TH Sarabun PSK. Use Sarabun on Google Fonts, which is the same design lineage packaged properly as a webfont under the SIL Open Font License. The Google Fonts repository lists it as OFL, Thai as its primary script, added on 28 October 2013, and developed at github.com/cadsondemak/Sarabun.

Sarabun ships sixteen variants: eight weights from Thin 100 to ExtraBold 800, each with a matching italic. That is four times the weight range of PSK, with hinting, latin-ext and vietnamese coverage, and hosting. Wikipedia’s National Fonts article records the lineage plainly: Sarabun is based on TH Sarabun New, which is based on TH SarabunPSK. In 2018 Cadson Demak, the foundry Suppakit Chalermlarp went on to work with, revised all thirteen National Fonts for Google Fonts with more hinting, wider weight ranges and better Unicode support.

The trap is the family name. Sarabun, TH Sarabun New and TH SarabunPSK are three unrelated entries in any font menu. Google’s Sarabun will never satisfy a Word template that specifies TH Sarabun PSK, however similar it looks on screen. Other free options for screen and interface work sit in Noto Sans Thai and the wider free Thai fonts and looped Thai fonts categories. Compare any of them with your own text in the Thai font tester.

Name variants and spellings

TH Sarabun PSK is searched under a long list of names, spacings and transliterations. All of the following refer to the same 2007 file:

• TH Sarabun PSK — the form used in regulations and templates
• TH SarabunPSK — the closed-up form, which is how Wikipedia writes it and how it often appears in font menus
• Thai Sarabun PSK — the form Microsoft used in its 2018 Office 365 announcement
• ฟอนต์ TH Sarabun PSK — the everyday Thai search phrase
• ฟอนต์สารบรรณ / สารบรรณ — the Thai name; สารบรรณ means documentary affairs
• ฟร้อน thai sarabun psk — a very common Thai misspelling of ฟอนต์, and a real search phrase
• TH Saraban PSK — an RTGS-flavoured spelling; สารบรรณ romanises as Saraban
• THSarabunPSK — the filename form, with no spaces

Names that are not this font, despite looking close: TH Sarabun New is the 2011 revision, and Sarabun with no prefix is the Google Fonts family. If a template names one of those, install that one instead — a font menu will not treat them as the same family.

Best use cases

TH Sarabun PSK is the right file whenever the receiving side names it — which covers most Thai official work — and the wrong file for anything on the web. Concrete briefs:

• Official correspondence, memos and reports produced under the Office of the Prime Minister’s Sarabun regulations
• Ministry and agency Word templates, tender documents and PDF forms that specify the font by name
• University thesis and coursework templates that hard-code TH Sarabun PSK
• Opening, editing and auditing older government files already set in it, where you need the font name to match on export
• Anything destined for the Government Gazette workflow, which has used TH Sarabun PSK since January 2011

Where it does not fit: web and app work, which should load Sarabun from Google Fonts; anything needing a weight range, since four cuts cannot carry a display hierarchy; and branding, which is not what a document face is for. If you are on macOS and hitting Thai rendering bugs, work in TH Sarabun New 1.35 and only convert to the PSK name if the recipient requires it.

Licensing

TH Sarabun PSK is free of charge for public and official use: SIPA and the Department of Intellectual Property released the thirteen National Fonts royalty-free through f0nt.com. Verify the distribution on the f0nt.com National Fonts page before relying on any other download source.

The formal licence text is where PSK and New separate. The GPL 2.0 with font exception statement published by f0nt.com is attached to the 2011 TH Sarabun New release, not to the 2007 PSK files, and f0nt.com’s own wording is that the agencies rewrote the licence to make the font freer than it had been. The 2010 Thai Linux Working Group thread records what the earlier terms cost in practice: a modified version could not keep the original name.

The practical consequence: if your use is embedding in a PDF or Word file, or setting documents for a Thai agency, PSK is fine and is the name you are expected to use. If your use involves modifying the font, redistributing it inside a product, or shipping it under an open-source licence, work from TH Sarabun New under GPL 2.0 with the font exception, or from Sarabun under the OFL. Compare the terms side by side in the Thai font licensing guide.

The actual PSK licence text (read from the file inside the zip on 8 September 2026). The official set ships “DIP&SIPA Font License Agreement.txt”, dated 21 September 2006, in Thai and English; its Thai title is สัญญาอนุญาตให้ใช้โปรแกรมคอมพิวเตอร์ฟอนต์, and the copyright owners are the Department of Intellectual Property, Ministry of Commerce, and SIPA. Four terms: (1) “Allow to use without any charges and allow to reproduce, study, adapt and distribute this Font Computer Program. Neither the original version nor adapted version of Font Computer Program may be sold by itself, except bundled and/or sold with any computer program.”; (2) anyone adapting it must notify DIP and SIPA in writing; (3) adapted versions may not use the reserved names — all four TH Sarabun PSK styles are listed — nor the owners’ or designer’s names in promotion; (4) adapted versions stay under the same licence. The same text is embedded in the name table of all four font files.

What this changes from what this page used to say: PSK is explicitly redistributable, not merely “free to use”. The real restrictions are two — no selling the file on its own, and adapted versions must be renamed and the owners notified. The 2010 Thai Linux mailing-list complaint that a modified version “cannot keep the original name” is clause (3) exactly, 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 (see the TH Sarabun New hub). This is the legal footing on which we mirror the unmodified original on our own server, with the original licence file alongside.

Information verified as of September 2026