Surveys in non-Roman scripts?

[Jitka Hiscox]

Hi, is it possible to program the surveys in non-Roman scripts? I am trying to program a survey in amharic and not sure whether that would be possible in KoBo.
Thanks!
Jitka

[Neil Hendrick]

Jitka,

Yes and No. 

The interface is available for localization in most common languages. Amharic is not one of them. If it were a language supported in the Android operating system, then we could add it to the application, but I don't think it is supported. 

I suppose that you are working in Ethiopia if you are using Amharic, which is included in Unicode, so it is not so uncommon.

You can, however, render your text as images and use the images as your labels. This is a solution for building your form when you are using an unsupported language. 

Because KoBoCollect is derived from ODK Collect, whatever works with ODK works with KoBo. ODK has provided some instruction for using images as labels here: http://opendatakit.org/help/image-based-forms/

Basically, you make your text into images. You can do this in photoshop/Gimp/illustrator, etc. OR, you can use the renderer here: http://23.21.114.69/text_renderer/

This might give you a little trouble if you don't have a UTF8 font for Ahmaric. No matter what, if you can type it on your computer, somehow you can make images out of it. Once you get past that, I suggest giving each image label a meaningful name.

from the ODK website's instructions:

Create an iText element with the media’s filename:

<text id="NameInHindi">

   <value form="image">jr://images/name_in_hindi.png</value>

</text>

Then in the body you can reference it like so:

<input ref="q1">

  <label ref="jr:itext('NameInHindi')"/>

</input>

I hope that is some help, let us know if you need some help making your forms work with image based labels. 

~Neil Hendrick

KoBo Developer

Jitka

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