Building forms in Hindi

Hi,

I am quite new to ODK Collect. I'm based in Mumbai working with a
local NGO on interventions and research on women and child health. We
employ local fieldworkers to collect cross-sectional survey data in
slum areas. As they are not fluent in English, we need to design the
forms in Hindi (Devanagari) for display on the devices they will use.
Our database will be in English, so the fieldworkers will only need to
understand and complete the surveys on the mobile device. My query is
two-fold: is it possible to build forms in Hindi and, if so, how? Can
Android devices display the Hindi font? I have read that the OS does
not have the capability yet.

Many thanks,
Glyn Alcock

Hi Glyn,
I've been having the same troubles with Hindi on Android. The short answer
is that Android currently does not support correctly rendering Hindi as a
font. The new Android 3.0 reportedly has fixed their rendering and fully
supports Hindi, but I've yet to try it.

As an alternative, we've been taking screen captures of Hindi phrases and
putting them into the forms as images. This has it's own limitations as you
have to play around a bit to determine the correct image size, and limits
you to multiple-choice questions since there's no hindi-keyboard. You could
have the questions in Hindi and collect data in english or use audio capture
for short answer, but then you need to translate later.

Yet another alternative is to have all the questions in english and include
an audio file for each that "reads" the question out loud in Hindi.

I'm happy to discuss with you more about how to get any of these working.
-Carl

ยทยทยท On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Glyn wrote:

Hi,

I am quite new to ODK Collect. I'm based in Mumbai working with a
local NGO on interventions and research on women and child health. We
employ local fieldworkers to collect cross-sectional survey data in
slum areas. As they are not fluent in English, we need to design the
forms in Hindi (Devanagari) for display on the devices they will use.
Our database will be in English, so the fieldworkers will only need to
understand and complete the surveys on the mobile device. My query is
two-fold: is it possible to build forms in Hindi and, if so, how? Can
Android devices display the Hindi font? I have read that the OS does
not have the capability yet.

Many thanks,
Glyn Alcock

--
Post: opendatakit@googlegroups.com
Unsubscribe: opendatakit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
Options: http://groups.google.com/group/opendatakit?hl=en

Hi Glyn,

We use ODK for a survey in Karnataka that is conducted mostly in Kannada and
sometimes in Hindi/Urdu. Since Android cannot render any of these fonts, we
transliterated them into English. e.g. เคจเคพเคฎ is written as 'naam' (just
like gmail enables you to type in languages!). We verified the appropriate
transliteration with our enumerator team and took a few extra days of
training going over this system with the our enumerator team. This
obviously depends on the ability of your enumerator team to read English
letters, but we found many of enumerators, even with limited knowledge of
English, were used to reading transliterated Kannada in text messages,
emails, road signs, etc.. Added bonus: this system allows those of us
running the survey who don't know the language to pick up on errors more
quickly, learn the language well enough to double check translations, and
more generally make changes to the survey text when needed. In the
meantime, if Android starts supporting these scripts, we may switch over.

Emily

ยทยทยท On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Carl Hartung wrote:

Hi Glyn,
I've been having the same troubles with Hindi on Android. The short answer
is that Android currently does not support correctly rendering Hindi as a
font. The new Android 3.0 reportedly has fixed their rendering and fully
supports Hindi, but I've yet to try it.

As an alternative, we've been taking screen captures of Hindi phrases and
putting them into the forms as images. This has it's own limitations as you
have to play around a bit to determine the correct image size, and limits
you to multiple-choice questions since there's no hindi-keyboard. You could
have the questions in Hindi and collect data in english or use audio capture
for short answer, but then you need to translate later.

Yet another alternative is to have all the questions in english and include
an audio file for each that "reads" the question out loud in Hindi.

I'm happy to discuss with you more about how to get any of these working.
-Carl

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Glyn g.alcock@ucl.ac.uk wrote:

Hi,

I am quite new to ODK Collect. I'm based in Mumbai working with a
local NGO on interventions and research on women and child health. We
employ local fieldworkers to collect cross-sectional survey data in
slum areas. As they are not fluent in English, we need to design the
forms in Hindi (Devanagari) for display on the devices they will use.
Our database will be in English, so the fieldworkers will only need to
understand and complete the surveys on the mobile device. My query is
two-fold: is it possible to build forms in Hindi and, if so, how? Can
Android devices display the Hindi font? I have read that the OS does
not have the capability yet.

Many thanks,
Glyn Alcock

--
Post: opendatakit@googlegroups.com
Unsubscribe: opendatakit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
Options: http://groups.google.com/group/opendatakit?hl=en

--
Post: opendatakit@googlegroups.com
Unsubscribe: opendatakit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
Options: http://groups.google.com/group/opendatakit?hl=en

Thanks Emily and Carl for your replies.
We had thought about transliterating the Hindi, but our supervisors
felt that the fieldworkers might struggle with non-Hindi characters.
We can easily test this out. Using screen captures is also a
possibility but I wonder how much extra memory this would use? Also,
how technical is it to do? We are keen to keep things as simple as
possible so that the field supervisors can take ownership. I guess we
will test these solutions and get back if we have further queries. We
have some other questions, which I will ask on new posts to avoid
confusion.

Thanks again
Glyn

ยทยทยท On Apr 25, 10:54 pm, Carl Hartung wrote: > Hi Glyn, > I've been having the same troubles with Hindi on Android. The short answer > is that Android currently does not support correctly rendering Hindi as a > font. The new Android 3.0 reportedly has fixed their rendering and fully > supports Hindi, but I've yet to try it. > > As an alternative, we've been taking screen captures of Hindi phrases and > putting them into the forms as images. This has it's own limitations as you > have to play around a bit to determine the correct image size, and limits > you to multiple-choice questions since there's no hindi-keyboard. You could > have the questions in Hindi and collect data in english or use audio capture > for short answer, but then you need to translate later. > > Yet another alternative is to have all the questions in english and include > an audio file for each that "reads" the question out loud in Hindi. > > I'm happy to discuss with you more about how to get any of these working. > -CarlOn Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Glyn wrote: > > Hi, > > > I am quite new to ODK Collect. I'm based in Mumbai working with a > > local NGO on interventions and research on women and child health. We > > employ local fieldworkers to collect cross-sectional survey data in > > slum areas. As they are not fluent in English, we need to design the > > forms in Hindi (Devanagari) for display on the devices they will use. > > Our database will be in English, so the fieldworkers will only need to > > understand and complete the surveys on the mobile device. My query is > > two-fold: is it possible to build forms in Hindi and, if so, how? Can > > Android devices display the Hindi font? I have read that the OS does > > not have the capability yet. > > > Many thanks, > > Glyn Alcock > > > -- > > Post: opendatakit@googlegroups.com > > Unsubscribe: opendatakit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com > > Options:http://groups.google.com/group/opendatakit?hl=en

you are right, Android doesn't take any font as , it doesn't have any font installed in the system to overcome this issue you can follow two steps: But , I prefer second one.

  1. Root you device and install that font into you sytem
  2. Convert you file or the font into Unicode, as it is universal and then put it in you file , your android system will take it without any issue.
    (For following 2nd one you can go online and can find out your hindi text font to unicode converter.)
1 Like