The Qt virtual keyboard provides you with an input interface and keyboard link for Qt 5 on Linux Desktop/X11, Windows Desktop and Boot2Qt - embedded target platforms. In addition to the virtual keyboard, the module also offers universal handwriting recognition with support for multiple languages.
Choose from customizable keyboard layouts and styles with dynamic switching, multi-character support (Latin, Simplified/Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, and more), support for an ever-growing number of languages, easy to expand language support while maintaining cross-platform functionality.
Some interesting features from previous releases:
- Input from left to right and right to left.
- Predictive text input with word selection.
- Symbol preview and alternate symbol view.
- Automatic capitalization and insertion of spaces.
- Scalable to different resolutions.
- Hardware key support for two way and 5 way navigation.
- Sound feedback.
- Handwriting support with gestures for full screen input.
New opportunities!
With Qt 5.10 comes a new release of Qt Virtual Keyboard: 2.3. In this release, we have provided many new layouts:
- Bulgarian
- Czech
- Croatian
- Dutch
- Greek
- Estonian
- Hebrew
- Hungarian
- Serbian
All languages provided by Qt's virtual keyboard will also be supported by the new handwriting solution, including most Latin languages, including Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Here's a GIF showing Korean handwriting support and my first attempts at writing in Korean:
Japanese keyboard input received a few fixes (it no longer crashes when pressing spacebar after typing an emoji, many small fixes and optimizations).
We have also added an InputModeKey to switch between different input modes (e.g. different Asian layouts, numeric, Latin).
The Qt virtual keyboard is available under the open source GPLv3 license and under a commercial license from the Qt company. Currently, there is a choice to use the open source handwriting recognition and word prediction engine or the commercial form T9 Write Nuance. We are also working with other partners to expand support for other commercial engines in Qt releases. More information about upcoming partnerships is available here .
The new Qt Virtual Keyboard 2.3 is included in the upcoming Qt 5.10 release.
Stay tuned for more great new additions to Qt 5.10.
Article written by: Mitch Curtis | Monday, November 20, 2017
