Keyboard

The keyboard service works with the keyboard provided by the HMI to display and manage the on-screen keyboard, or with a physical keyboard to enable input from that keyboard.

Overview

The keyboard service (keyboard-imf) lets applications communicate with the on-screen keyboard through PPS objects. It allows them to:
  • show and hide the keyboard
  • know the keyboard height, in pixels, so they can, if necessary, adjust their displays to fit into the remaining available screen area
  • accept text entries and know how many characters have been entered

Interaction of HMI, keyboards, and applications

The diagram below shows how keyboard-imf interacts with the HMI virtual keyboards:

Figure 1. Keyboards, keyboard-imf and applications.

Physical keyboard

To use a physical keyboard (connected through a USB port), you need to:
  • Configure the QNX Screen globals input parameter in the Screen configuration file (graphics.conf) to accept input from a physical keyboard. For more information, see "Configuration parameters for globals" in the Screen Graphics Subsystem Developer's Guide.
  • Make sure that your system has the language-specific key mapping files for the languages you will support. These files should be in the /usr/share/keyboard/ directory.