typography tutorial \u00b7 beginner · 12 min

Understanding Thai Font Licensing

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · April 16, 2026

Information verified as of April 2026

What you’ll learn

This guide explains the four Thai font licenses you will encounter \u2014 SIL Open Font License, free-for-personal-use, commercial-paid, and proprietary-bundled \u2014 and how to verify which applies to any specific font before you use it commercially. Reading time twelve minutes; the rules apply equally to print, web, packaging, and broadcast use.

Why this matters

Misusing a Thai font commercially is one of the most common legal mistakes designers working in the Thai market make, and it costs real money. Thai foundries (Cadson Demak, Katatrad, PSL Smart Font, DB Thai Text) actively monitor commercial use and routinely send invoices to brands found using their fonts without licenses. The settlement amounts are typically low five-figure THB but they hit the agency’s reputation harder than the wallet.

SIL Open Font License (OFL)

The SIL Open Font License is the safest license for commercial Thai work because it permits commercial use, modification, embedding, and redistribution at no cost, provided the OFL terms travel with any redistributed font file. The Thai National Font set (13 families including Sarabun, Bai Jamjuree, Pridi, Mali, Itim) ships under SIL OFL 1.1 thanks to the Department of Intellectual Property’s 2010 funded release. Most Cadson Demak fonts on Google Fonts also ship under OFL.

What you can do under OFL:

• Use the font in any commercial work (print, web, packaging, broadcast).
• Embed the font in PDFs and web pages.
• Modify the font (with the modified version also released under OFL).

What you must do under OFL:

• Keep the OFL license file with any redistributed font files.
• Not sell the font on its own as a commercial product.

Free-for-personal-use

Most fonts on community sites like f0nt.com and FreeThaiFont.com are licensed for personal use only \u2014 commercial use requires explicit permission from the foundry or designer. The trap is that “free download” reads as “free to use” to designers unfamiliar with the licensing landscape. Before commercial use, email the foundry through the contact channel on its f0nt.com page or FreeThaiFont profile and obtain written permission. Many will grant it for a small fee; some will refuse outright; some will not respond, in which case you cannot use the font.

Commercial / paid licenses

Cadson Demak, Katatrad, PSL Smart Font, and DB Thai Text are the four largest commercial Thai foundries; each publishes per-seat or per-use rate cards that you should consult before committing a font to a brand identity. Cadson Demak’s licensing page lists rates for desktop, web, app, and broadcast use; rates are typically in the low THB thousands per font for small organisations and scale into mid-five-figures for enterprise. Buying the license once does not transfer to your client; client uses require a separate license.

Proprietary-bundled

Cordia New, Angsana New, and several other looped fonts ship bundled with Microsoft Office and are licensed only for use within Microsoft products by the Office license holder. Embedding these fonts in a brand identity for a client is a license violation. The historical convention of treating these fonts as freely available because they ship with every Thai Windows installation is wrong; they are proprietary Microsoft assets.

How to verify a license

Check four sources before commercial use: the font’s official foundry page, the OFL.txt file inside the font ZIP, the font’s Google Fonts page if hosted there, and the foundry’s contact channel for written confirmation. ThaiGraph’s font directory tags every entry with its verified license category and links to the foundry’s official page. If we cannot verify a license we do not list a download link on that font’s page.

Common mistakes

• Treating Google Fonts as universally free. Google Fonts hosts both OFL and Apache 2.0 fonts. Both permit commercial use, but only OFL requires the license to travel with the font file. Apache 2.0 is more permissive in that regard.
• Embedding a free-for-personal-use font in a commercial PDF. Embedding is redistribution; redistribution requires explicit license permission.
• Modifying a non-OFL font. Most commercial Thai foundries explicitly prohibit modification.
• Subsetting without checking license. Some commercial Thai foundries explicitly prohibit subsetting (extracting only a few characters); the OFL permits it.

Common questions

For specific licensing questions about individual fonts in the directory, check the font’s page (which lists the license category) and email the foundry directly. ThaiGraph cannot grant or interpret licenses on behalf of any third-party foundry.

Next steps

Browse commercial-safe (OFL) Thai fonts in the directory, or read the Thai Typography pillar for the full context on Thai type history, classification, and bilingual layout.

Information verified as of April 2026