Chromium-Browser in Yocto with Touch-Keyboard

[MOW]

Hi all

We'd like to integrate the Chromium-Browser in our Yocto-OS-Images for our i.MX6-based devices (using the "meta-browser" Yocto-layer). This works already quite well (with Chromium versions 40, 41, 42, and 43), but we have trouble getting a virtual touch-keyboard working to allow text input in web-pages. All our devices are equipped with resistive or capacitive touchscreens and none of our customers is using our devices with real hardware keyboards. Therefore we need to provide virtual soft-keyboards on the display, which can be be used via the touchscreen.

While the more or less full desktop Yocto-configurations (with the "sato" or "xfce" desktops) do provide working soft-keyboards, it seems that these must always be shown and hidden manually by the user using the desktop-panel/-dock. These keyboards don't open/close automatically when you select a text-input field in the Chromium browser, and when you start Chromium in "kiosk"-mode (i.e. without GUI-decoration, URL-address-line, etc), as most of our customers demand, these soft-keyboards don't seem to work at all. You can't even open them, because the desktop-panel is not shown on the display (on purpose), when Chromium is running in kiosk-mode.

While Chromium itself seems to include code for its own private soft-keyboard in the Chromium source-tree, and provides command-line options like "--enable-virtual-keyboard", this presumed Chromium-internal soft-keyboard doesn't seem to work, either. Adding debugging messages to the corresponding Chromium source-code shows, that it doesn't even seem to try calling the soft-keyboard functions.

Using Chromium-Extensions we have also been only partially successful:

• Using the "Google Input Tool" extension, which several online forums recommend, doesn't seem to work, at all: Most of the time we're unable this keyboard at all, an even when it does pop-up occasionally, button presses don't get sent to the selected text-input fields
• Using the "Virtual Keyboard" extension from xontab.com found in the Chromium Web-Store works somewhat for most web-forms, but it fails completely e.g. for the search-form on www.google.com (opens briefly but closes immediately again before you're able to type even a single letter) and on forms, where it works, it often doesn't scroll the web-site properly when it opens, so that you don't see the text-input field you're typing into.

Does anybody have an idea, how to enable the Chromium-internal soft-keyboard or how to integrate one of the desktop virtual keyboards (like "matchbox-keyboard" or "xkb") in such a way into the system, that they pop-up automatically when selecting a text-input field in the Chromium browser? Or does anybody know better Chromium soft-keyboard extensions that work on all web-forms automatically?

Thanks for your help.

Kind Regards,

Marc

[nikhersche]

Hi Marc

I'm having the same problem. Did you find a solution?

Regards

Nik

[MOW]

Hi Nik

Not really. But our customers seem to be happy with the "Virtual Keyboard" from xontab found in the Chromium store, so far.

The only information we figured out regarding the "official" soft-keyboard of the Chromium browser is, that it seems to be intended to be used only together with the full Chromium-OS.

Regards Marc

[OtavioSalvador]

Hello Marc-Oliver,

At O.S. Systems we've been supporting some customers using Chromium and as well our i.MX6 enabled QtWebEngine.

From your description it is clear that you would benefit of using the QtWebEngine as you could run it in EGLFS and avoid all the boilerplate of X environment. This could also rely on a QML virtual keyboard and do a much more polished product.

If you want assistance with Chromium and/or QtWebEngine please contact me privately and we can move on, on this.

Best Regards,

[MOW]

Thanks Otavio,

Do you also have a proper soft-keyboard solution for Chromium, which also works with current stable Chromium releases? Our customers prefer Chromium to the QtWebEngine due to far better HTML5-support, significantly higher rendering performance and easier web-app development, as customers can test and debug their web-applications easily with the regular Chrome-Desktop-Browser on their PCs already.

[OtavioSalvador]

We did this integration for one project, yes. However we have been way more successful using QtWebEngine than plan Chromium in many projects.

If you want, we can have a short talk to discuss each approach and its pros and cons. If necessary we can explore the possible solutions but we need to better understand the use-cases involved.

[davidlockyer]

HI Otavio,

I am also currently trying  to get a soft-keyboard for chromium working, is this something you are willing to share?

Best regards,

David

[OtavioSalvador]

We did this for some projects of customers. We wrote a virtual keyboard for some of them (for those running on top of X11) and did apps using WebEngine which had virtual keyboards as part of them.

It is all customer-related work, nothing of this is opensource from our side. Sorry.

[jamesbone]

Hello Marc,

We are discussing internally about your issue, as soon as we have a response, we will back to you.