Any “Google Keyboard” Whisperers out there? API19

Question

I'm having what seems to be an odd problem, and I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions which might help.

I'm trying to achieve due diligence by testing on a variety of screen form factors, but I'm having a problem when it comes to the default ( AKA Google ) keyboard on an emulated Nexus 4 using API level 19. AFAIK, according to the on-line specs the Nexus 4 was released with API 17, so it would seem to me that 19 ought to be able to handle any hardware in the Nexus 4.

I'm working with an app that displays a document and if the User wishes, allows notes about the document to be entered, at the same time the document is being viewed. By default most of the screen is taken by the view of the document. But when a Button is pressed to allow notes about the document to be entered, Views are re-arranged to allow for a soft keyboard to be displayed along with an EditText view to accept the notes and still allow for as much of the document to be viewed, as conveniently as possible, and scrolling is provided.

In the default "portrait" orientation I'm able to shoehorn in what I need with out too many problems; but oddly in "landscape" orientation, no matter how I try to constrain it, the on-screen keyboard itself occupies fully half the screen "height" and takes the other half with a separate input area it displays, several lines high; the "DONE" button is displayed separately about half way up the height of the input area near the right screen edge.

In order to keep the soft keyboard and any associated input area as small/simple as possible, I've supplied these attributes for the EditText:

android:inputType="text|textNoSuggestions|textShortMessage"
android:singleLine="true"

and this for the themes in my styles.xml file :

<item name="android:windowSoftInputMode">stateUnchanged</item>

I've even considered going as far as building a custom keyboard structure in XML, etc.. But my understanding is that Android won't allow a keyboard definition to be used "privately" for just one app; instead it requires a custom keyboard description to be approved by the User as the User's standard keyboard, or won't allow the custom keyboard to be used at all.

Have I've missed something? Am I not making the correct use of attributes for my purpose? Is there something else I need to do in order to get the desired effect? Does the actual Nexus 4 behave as I've described? Or is there a problem with the Emulation?

I'd be very grateful for any helpful thoughts.

Hopefully some images will help to illustrate the issue.

Default document viewing mode:

After the User presses the "MAKE NOTES" Button, note taking mode. This is before the User presses within the EditText view ( which is displaying the hint string "To enter notes, press here" ) :

When the "MAKE NOTES" button is pressed I rearrange things. It appears to me that the controls fit roughly in the upper left quadrant, the document view is placed in the notably smaller scrollable area roughly in the upper right quadrant; I request that the keyboard be displayed, and it fits on the screen below those things. Since the keyboard does fit, I wouldn't have expected the "extract" view; especially since by the time I got these emulator screen snapshots, I had restricted the EditText view to one text line, so I would expect input to occur in place, within the EditView, just as it does in "portrait" orientation...

Instead, when the User presses within the EditText view:

Answer 1

There is no way to change the height of the keyboard. The keyboard itself sets that, in the onComputeInsets of the InputMethodService class, combined with the height of the view returned in onCreateInputView.

You actually can create a keyboard just for your app, but your users will hate you. You aren't going to write Swype functionality, or good autocorrect, or anything else without spending the years on it the other companies have.

What you seem to be describing is a full-screen editing situation called extract view where the keyboard takes over the full screen in landscape mode. THat's the standard Android experience for phones because too little of the screen is left for apps to be usable. Is that what you're seeing, or is it something else? If it is extract mode, try adding android:imeOptions="flagNoExtractUi" to the textview .