MappView PDFViewer - On-screen keyboard for text search

Ask Questions HMI & Visualization
,
1

Hallo Community

We have a use case regarding the mappView PDFViewer widget where it would be interesting to know if anyone has already solved this.

Background

In the properties, the widget allows you to choose whether to use the mappView plugin or the browser’s built-in viewer.

image

Problem

Our use case now involves a touch panel without a physical keyboard.
In the operating system (Linux), the system keyboard is disabled so that only the mappView keyboard appears.
The PDF viewer should now offer a text search function to look for specific keywords or asset IDs within a diagram.

This use case can be implemented using a dedicated browser plugin (pdf.js) to the extent that the viewer is displayed with a search bar.
The problem, however, is that when you click in the search bar, no keyboard appears because the system keyboard is disabled.

image
image967×201 10.6 KB

Approaches

As the PDF viewer is open-source, one approach would be to extend this add-on so that a dedicated keyboard, integrated into the plugin, appears within it.
However, this is not as straightforward as assumed, and a third keyboard would need to be maintained alongside the Linux system keyboard and the mappView keyboard, which would then not have the layout of mappView’s language-specific custom keyboards.

Does anyone here have a different approach, or perhaps has this already been solved?

Thank you in advance for your feedback.
<°///—<

3

Hello @FIH-RSB, looks like no one there has solved it. If you do so, it would be great if you shared details with us :slight_smile:

5

I just want to add that we are searching for a reliable solution as well.
We are using a Windows panel and adressed this to B&R some years prior. They wrote us a custom tool that listens to a PVI variable and as soon as this is set to true it opens the standard on screen keyboard (OSK) in Windows.
We added a custom “search” icon floating next to the search bar. If this icon is pressed the variable to open the OSK is set by the PLC. Once the custom tool registers this, the variable is reset and the keyboard does open.
This solution worked, but we are not using it any longer. Maintaining it over different PVI generations shows some problems. As we do’ not have the code we can’t change it to work via OpcUa. Another problem is, that this OSK is a fully functional windows keyboard. Its easy to leave the kiosk mode. Windows + d, alt + tab etc. everything works. That was always a half-baked DIYish solution.
Our customers asked to view the manual and the wiring diagram as pdf on the HMI. Those pdfs can be several hundred pages long nobody wants to scroll through.
Without a working search function, the PDF viewing feature cannot be considered fully developed.