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Setting Thai type on screens without making it look borrowed
Three habits from Latin typography that quietly break Thai, and what to do instead in a bilingual design system.
Thai has ascenders, descenders and vowel marks stacked above and below the line. Most web typography defaults were tuned for Latin, and three of them do real damage: tight line-height clips the marks, negative letter-spacing collides the glyphs, and “bold” in a Latin face is a different weight from “bold” in its Thai companion.
What we do instead
Line-height around 1.6–1.7 for body text in Thai; never below 1.5.
Letter-spacing of zero. Tracking is a Latin display habit; Thai does not need it and does not survive it.
A pairing tested side by side at every size the system uses, so the Thai and Latin lines of a bilingual lockup carry the same weight.