The Qt Virtual Keyboard has been available for a bit over one year and nicely adopted in various devices built with Qt. With the upcoming version 2.0 it will allow gesture based text input as well as typing. In addition to handwriting recognition (HWR) functionality the upcoming Qt Virtual Keyboard 2.0 is bringing performance optimizations, support for Traditional Chinese language, and a couple of other features requested by customers.
The Qt Virtual Keyboard is a versatile text input component available for commercial Qt licensees. It provides a customizable framework for text input using a virtual keyboard - and now also handwriting recognition. The Qt Virtual Keyboard makes it easy to extent the provided set of input methods and to use different 3rd party engines for word prediction and character recognition. The core features of the Qt Virtual Keyboard are covered in a recent blog post about version 1.3 as well as the documentation.
The most important new features of Qt Virtual Keyboard 2.0 are:
- Generic support for shape recognition based input methods
- Full screen HWR mode (on-top writing)
- A reference implementation of handwriting input method with open-source Lipi toolkit alphabetic + numeric recognizer integration (English)
- Performance optimizations for Lipi toolkit and background processing of recognition results
- Nuance T9 Write HWR integration (commercial product with support for over 40 languages)
- Word reselect functionality using open-source Hunspell prediction framework
- Support for runtime language switching and language selection from a Qt application
- Traditional Chinese support and keyboard layout
We are eager to hear feedback of the new features, especially the handwriting recognition. If you are visiting the Qt World Summit, please drop by and see it in action. There will also be a technology preview release available for download in the coming weeks.
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