1. What is the problem? Be very detailed.
We received household survey data that was programmed in Amharic and some of the text responses appear as question marks. I am not in the field with data collectors and do not know if they are typing question marks or if they used Amharic/Geez fonts to type. There was no problem when we converted the excel questionnaire to XForm and the Amharic fonts appear on the tablets.
2. What app or server are you using and on what device and operating system? Include version numbers.
Data was collected using ODK collect 1.25
3. What you have you tried to fix the problem?
4. What steps can we take to reproduce the problem?
5. Anything else we should know or have? If you have a test form or screenshots or logs, attach below.
They are not typing question marks, they are typing in Amharic, the problem exists only on your computer right now. So there is no problem with the form, you just need to fix the settings on you're end and maybe download a fresh copy of the data as opening it and saving it in excel often causes problems.
Try downloading in CSV and opening with Notepad to see how it really looks. If you search on this forum you might find an example where someone solved the problem with Arabic or another alphabet and find that the same process will work for you.
Does anyone who speaks Amharic know if the script requires any local language installation on computers to be displayed properly?
I am not sure for Amharic, but for Arabic we have to make sure we download/open everything with UTF-8 encoding. Excel tends to make a mess of this kind of formatting, so we tend to open in something else (I usually just import directly into STATA which can retain UTF-8).