How to develop a custom Soft Keyboard for an Android application?

Question

I have a Math-related application that I made, and I really would like to make a regular soft keyboard. It will have attributes like numpad and special characters like pi characters and square roots. I would like for him to replace the default keyboard only for this application and open only the keyboard that I developed for this application. My question is: how do I do this? Am I creating a “keyboard” from table layouts and a bunch of buttons that open when I click on a text box, or am I using a keyboard layout?

Answer 1

You should not create a table layout and a bunch of buttons, this is an unfamiliar user interface and creates a bad user interface. See this answer on how to create a custom soft keyboard that is identical to the platform soft keyboard but contains the keys you need: a special soft keyboard for Android.

Answer 2

You can do a RelativeLayout, with lines of buttons such as a keyboard at the bottom of the screen (using line layouts), or if you need a keyboard with system latitude, I would look at the Hackerskeyboard for an example.