How do I force the keyboard to stay open in Safari?

I disagree with your statement that it will automatically appear when you need it.

Here is my situation. I'm creating a formula editor similar to MathType using an Html 5 Canvas. I have one in Flash, but need it to work on IOS. The canvas can receive the focus and it can receive keyboard events. However, the keyboard does not display on an Ipad or Iphone. On an android device you can force it to display by pressing and holding the menu button, but in IOS. I can't figure out how to get it to display programatically. If HTML5 is supposed to be a replacement of Flash, then a feature to display the keyboard should really be there. I plan on trying either today or tomorrow on creating a proof of concept for this using possibly a hidden input field to proxy all my keyboard events for the canvas, but it would have been a lot easier to just say, "display keyboard", or have the canvas say, "I need the keyboard". If we had that, then you can imagine the Canvas as being a better replacement for Flash.

I have the same problem. To suggest that the keyboard appears whenever it is needed is based on the flawed assumption that it is only needed for text boxes. I have a web site that captures keypress events and uses a HTML 5 canvas to create a special purpose editor (it will take a long time to explain why the usual editors are unsuitable - just accept it). It works fine on a PC but is unuseable on an iPhone and iPad simply because there appears to be no way to bring up the keyboard.

Other than to, perhaps, jailbreak your iDevice, there is no way to activate the iOS software keyboard whenever you want it to.

NONE!

A lot of the users who posted here gave a lot of B.S. answers/replies with NO real solution!

Anyone who posted otherwise is stating garbage, talking smack!

Julian Wright's answer IS the correct one!

The iOS software keyboard only becomes present when needed for alphanumeric key input and that is, in fact, that!

This is THE WAY it is by design with no way to circumvent this as a stock, un-jailbroken device!

Good Luck to You!

there are websites which might expedt keyboard input without input field.

see http://vim-adventures.com

what is your answer to that one? better use mac ;-)?

I have a person in the community I volunteer support for that does this same thing. "You can't, it's by design" every time someone says that I'm able to find some way to do exactly what they said couldnt be done. Anyways, usually you wouldn't want to obscure your screen. But maybe you're on a gamer site that has an Easter egg if you randomly type the Konnami code when nothing is focused. Or the site I sent someone that requires keyboard input and it types command line type things as buttons are mashed. it was fun in the context of little kid being like dev dad but we had to break out the laptop because neither of us feel like finding a needle-in-haystack method of writing something to pop it open.

I need to have it displayed while I'm reading a web page.

I'm also interested in an iPad-friendly "formula editor similar to MathType", and have found the keyboard behaviour most troublesome. If you are developing a solution that I might be able to license, please keep me informed.

-steve

If anyone is still interested, here is the closest I could get to a solution.

If the iPhone or iPad wants a text field, give it one. Create it immediately before the area your keystrokes will populate, then do everything you can to hide it.

<input type="text" id="keyboardtrigger" style="position: relative; top: 100px; background-color: transparent; border: transparent; height:0px;" />

Now, every event where you want to make the keyboard visible, add the Javascript line

$("#keyboardtrigger").focus();

And the keyboard appears. Take the focus away from the text box and it dissapears.

Just a couple of notes:-

• You will get a very small blinking cursor - hopefully not too much of a problem
• The keyboard works, but cursor movements and mouse drags for selecting your text doesn't. That is a totally different problem. Like the keyboard, they really only work in a text field.

I need the keyboard to stay visible when doing crosswords such as the Guardian cryptics. On Windows, eg in Chrome, the cursor advances one square at a time each time I type a letter. On my iPad, the keyboard disappears after each letter - very annoying. I have to select each letter square individually. So, in response to Julian Wright, there are definitely good reasons to keep the keyboard visible. It would be a very useful feature.

Two reasons it would be handy to be able to force the keyboard to appear:

Typing in a date or time in the calendar instead of playing slot machine to get the right one.

Typing the name of a folder in Mail to file a message.

I'm sure there are others. My BlackBerry could do both of these things.

I am another developer building a maths editor in an HTML element by handling key and mouse events and then generating MathJax which gets nicely rendered as WYSIWYG mathematics.

An <input> field almost worked but for some reason the Math gets rendered in a gray area below the input field.

I will likely take a crack at BGC's solution, but that means refactoring all over my app to decouple the browser's idea of the focus from the application's.

Much simpler would be for iOS to recognize that one can never anticipate the clever but sensible things developers will do with any powerful tool and just let us request keyboards when we (the user really) needs one.