Unicode standard now officially includes the symbol of Indian Rupee but there is an update to the new standards is also required in the existing fonts to be able to type the new symbol of currency in a spreadsheet or word processor with the help of a regular keyboard.
Certain font families such as Déjà vu fonts have been updated with the new standards of Unicode and thus are inclusive of new currency symbol support but the limited adaptation of these fonts is a big problem.
Well there is a good news – all the common fonts have been updated by Microsoft to be inclusive and supportive of the new symbol of Indian Rupee. This means a document can be opened inside notepad or Microsoft Word and a popular font can be selected such as Times New Roman or Arial and then the Indian Rupee sign can be typed there directly.
For starting, firstly you need updating the Windows existing fonts by the installation of kb2496898 hotfix which is available both for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. After this installation the fonts Times.ttf, Arial.ttf, Tohoma.ttf and some other files will get updated on your computer with their latest version.
Typing the Symbol of Indian Rupee with the font Arial
After launching Microsoft Word, the document font has to be changed to Tahoma or Arial, and then 20B9 has to be typed which has to be followed by Alt-x. If the string 20B9 gets converted in the symbol of Rupee, as shown in the above screen shot, it means the application of the update has been successful.
The following screencast explains how the symbol of Indian Rupee can be added to the documents.
Free download of the update of Microsoft fonts is available to all the people who are running a copy of genuine Windows Vista or Windows 7. However when the symbol of Indian Rupee is added to the document and shared with other people who are yet to have the latest version of Windows fonts, they will find some junk characters instead of the symbol of Rupee.
Creating a PDF of the Word document will be a good solution to the problem, the font embedding option has to be enabled and the preservation of the characters will thus be successful even when the font is missing. The PDF will contain the Rupee symbol even when the latest Arial font is not available on your machine.
Update: The updated fonts have been provided by Microsoft foe Windows Vista and Windows7 only but a commenter has pointed that when the ttf files were copied in the Windows XP computer they worked well. No official confirmation is available if windows XP supports these fonts or not.