The Qt Virtual Keyboard provides you an input framework and reference keyboard frontend for Qt 5 on Linux Desktop/X11, Windows Desktop, and Boot2Qt - embedded target platforms. In addition to a virtual keyboard, the module also offers versatile handwriting recognition with support for multiple different languages.
You can choose among customizable keyboard layouts and styles with dynamic switching, with support for different character sets (Latin, Simplified/Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, and others) and support for ever increasing number of languages, with possibility to easily extend the language support, preserving the cross-platform functionality.
Some cool features of earlier releases:
- Left-to-right and right-to-left input.
- Predictive text input with word selection.
- Character preview and alternative character view.
- Automatic capitalization and space insertion.
- Scalability to different resolutions.
- Hardware key support for 2-way and 5-way navigation.
- Audio feedback
- Handwriting support, with gestures for full screen input.
New features!
With Qt 5.10 comes a new release of Qt Virtual Keyboard: 2.3. With this release we have introduced many new layouts:
- Bulgarian
- Czech
- Croatian
- Dutch
- Greek
- Estonian
- Hebrew
- Hungarian
- Serbian
All languages provided by the Qt Virtual Keyboard will as well be supported with the new handwriting solution, including most Latin languages, also including Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Here's a GIF demonstrating the Korean handwriting support and my first attempts at writing Korean:
Korean handwriting support in Qt Virtual Keyboard
The Japanese keyboard input received several fixes (it no longer crashes when pressing the space after entering a smiley; there were a bunch of small fixes and optimizations).
We also added an InputModeKey to switch between different input modes (e.g. various Asian layouts, numeric, Latin).
Qt Virtual Keyboard is available under GPLv3 open source license and the commercial license from The Qt Company. There is currently choice to use open-source engine for handwriting recognition and word prediction, or a commercial T9 Write solution form Nuance. We are also working with other partners to extend the support for other commercial engines in lated releases of Qt. More info about the related upcoming partnerships is available here.
The new Qt Virtual Keyboard 2.3 is included into the upcoming Qt 5.10 release. Stay tuned to hear more about all the great new additions of Qt 5.10.
