Thai typography
While these loops are a major element of conventional handwritten Thai and traditional typefaces, the loopless style, which resembles sans-serif Latin characters and is also referred to as Roman-like, was introduced in the 1970s and has become highly popular.
Prior to the introduction of printing, Thai script had evolved along a calligraphic tradition, with most written records in the form of folding-book manuscripts known as samut khoi.
In 1819, Ann Hasseltine Judson, an American Baptist missionary based in Burma, translated the Gospel of Matthew, as well as a catechism and a tract, into Thai.
They were soon joined by a printer from the Baptist Board for Foreign Missions, who brought new printing equipment, and thus were able to start producing religious material for distribution.
The ABCFM and Baptist ministries later established separate printing houses, but initially, they relied on sharing the original set of type brought from Singapore.
In 1839, the government of King Rama III hired the ABCFM press to produce the country's first printed official document: 9,000 copies of a royal edict prohibiting the use or sale of opium.
[a][2][7] Bradley authored and printed several medical treatises, launched the first Thai-language newspaper—the Bangkok Recorder—in 1844, and published several books, including Nirat London—the first Thai work for which copyright fees were paid—in 1861.
[3][6] The earliest typefaces used by these printing establishments were based on the handwriting style of the period, and accordingly featured mostly angular shapes in a single thickness, and were slanted throughout.
As Bradley refined his craft, he shifted to upright types with outlines in the shape of vertical rectangles (as seen used in the Bangkok Recorder), and later, with Nirat London, introduced rounded curves.
Dozens of private printing enterprises arose during the following decades, and the Vajirañāṇa Library was established as a central repository of knowledge as well as a publishing regulator: it oversaw the production of a new genre of books known as cremation volumes, and in effect helped standardize the language's orthography.
[10][11] The first formal schools were established during Chulalongkon's reign, and as basic education further expanded under his successor Vajiravudh (King Rama VI, r. 1910–1925), so did demand for textbooks to facilitate teaching.
(Examples: Angsana UPC, Kinnari)[12] The reign of Vajiravudh also saw the beginnings of a flourishing press, and the newspaper industry underwent explosive growth into the 1930s, followed closely by pulp magazines.
[13][14] The new stage for public discourse contributed to the abolition of absolute monarchy in 1932, and as newspapers became more politically vocal, demand rose for large display types for their headlines.
These typefaces similarly featured a uniform stroke width and smooth curves, but mostly failed to gain traction among the wider industry, and the Monotype system soon became obsolete with the advent of offset printing.
Compatibility with the new offset-printing technology helped boost its popularity for creating display lettering in advertising, news printing, and the creation of political materials, especially during the 1973–1976 democracy movement.
[21] The advent of desktop publishing arrived with the Apple Macintosh, which was first imported in 1985 by Sahaviriya OA, who also developed the first Thai computer fonts in PostScript format.
These new typefaces, as well as digital fonts based on earlier classic types, were widely adopted as the media industry boomed amidst rapid economic growth, until halted by the 1997 financial crisis.
[21] Copyright regulations also lagged behind the rapid innovation and spread of information, and type designers had difficulty commercializing their work, leading to a slump following the initial period.
This led to heated discussions and conflicts with the publishing industry, who believed font designs to be in the Public Domain and saw PSL's practice as predatory litigation.
Most notable among them is Sarabun, which in 2010 was made the official typeface for all government documents, replacing the previous de facto standard Angsana (a UPC font family derived from Farang Ses).
[29][30][31] Among the trends seen during this period is a sharp rise in popularity of the loopless or Roman-like style introduced by Manop, which began seeing use as body text in some magazines in 1999.
Type designers have also introduced Thai typefaces with wider ranges of font weight, mostly in the loopless style, though their use continues to be a point of debate.
[1][32] There is not yet a single standard terminology for Thai typeface anatomy, and type designers have variably observed several features: Parinya in 2003 described six: heads, tails, mid-stroke loops, serrations, beaks, and flags.
[25][34] More recently, design company Cadson Demak has contributed to a classification model that assigns typefaces to three main categories—traditional (looped), display (topical) and modern (loopless)—with several subcategories to each.
The script type features letters distinctively shaped by their writing implement, while the decorative genre covers a large variety of designs, including those incorporating traditional patterns or stylized motifs.
[28] Generally, the distinction is seen as analogous to the use of serif and sans-serif typefaces in Latin script—looped terminals are seen as aiding legibility, making the style more suited for body text than loopless fonts.
Wallpaper magazine was criticized for using such a typeface as body text when it introduced its Thai edition in 2005, and when Apple adopted one for the user interface of its iOS 7 mobile operating system in 2013, customer complaints led the company to reverse course in a later update.
[36][34] While some designers see the opposition to loopless typefaces as a traditionalist rejection of change, critics claim that their overuse hinders legibility, and may cause confusion due to their similarity with Latin characters.
[32] A 2018 pilot study found that Thai readers were more likely to make errors when reading a test passage printed in Roman-like typefaces compared to ones with conventional loops.
