QML Virtual Keyboard Add New Layout

Question

I use qt qml 5.7 on Yocto project for raspberry pi. My project need virtual keyboard for Turkish language. QT Virtual Keyboard has no support Turkish language so i want to create my custom layout. I add my project example layout codes from here as name "myCustomLayout.qml".

And I run my virtual keyboard display function by following codes.

import QtQuick 2.5
import QtQuick.VirtualKeyboard 2.1
import QtQuick.Controls 2.0

InputPanel {
    id: inputPanel
    visible:  Qt.inputMethod.visible
    height:main.height/4
    y:main.height - height
    x:main.width/8
    width: main.width*6/8
    focus: true
}

When I run the virtual keyboard display function, the appearing keyboard was not my custom layout, it still regular English keyboard layout. How can add my custom keyboard layout in my app?

Please post solutions as answers not as updates to the questions. This is to avoid confusion for future readers. You can see from your revisions that I have rolled this change back. Thank you. — Bugs

Mitch Mitch · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-11T14:17:09

If you're using a Qt version earlier than 5.9, I think that you have to patch Qt Virtual Keyboard to add your custom layout and then rebuild it. It should be enough to modify this file by adding your own entry. For example:

contains(CONFIG, lang-tr.*) {
    LAYOUT_FILES += \
        content/layouts/tr_TR/main.qml
}

If you're using Qt 5.9 or later, you can set the QT_VIRTUALKEYBOARD_LAYOUT_PATH environment variable to the path of your custom style, as mentioned here:

The virtual keyboard layouts system supports built-in layouts as well as custom layouts. The built-in layouts are embedded as Qt Resources into the plugin binary. Custom layouts are located in the file system, so that they can be installed without recompiling the virtual keyboard itself, or they can be located in a resource file.

The selection of layouts at runtime is affected by the QT_VIRTUALKEYBOARD_LAYOUT_PATH environment variable.

In case the environment variable is not set, or contains an invalid directory, the virtual keyboard falls back to the default built-in layouts.

To prevent the built-in layouts from being built into the virtual keyboard plugin when using custom layouts, add disable-layouts to the CONFIG qmake variable. For more information, see Advanced Configuration Options.

To take an example from the module's source code, this test sets it to "/data/layouts".

As another example, suppose your application has the following directory structure:

C:\dev\temp\untitled
│   main.cpp
│   main.qml
│   resources.qrc
│   untitled.pro
│
└───en_GB
        dialpad.qml
        digits.qml
        handwriting.qml
        main.qml
        numbers.qml
        symbols.qml

You would set it to C:\dev\temp\untitled. It expects to see one or more folders, each one named after the language + country code that its layout represents, as seen here.

To verify that it's working, you can copy the en_GB layout from the link above into your project and modify it (I changed the 'Q' key to a 'Z').

QML Virtual Keyboard Add New Layout

2 Answers