Q. The keyboard on my iPad has moved up the screen. How do I pull it back down?
A. This option to “undock” iOS’s standard keyboard,added back in iOS 5, possesses a frustrating combination of qualities: It’s both unadvertised and possible to invoke by mistake.
Although you won’t find any mention of this in Apple’s iOS-keyboard help page or a separate introduction to the iPad’s onscreen keyboard, you only need to tap and hold the hide-keyboard button in the bottom right corner to get a menu to pop open with “Undock” and “Split” items.
The first moves the keyboard about 40 percent of the way up the screen. I am not sure what benefit that provides. I do know that when I undocked my iPad mini 4’s keyboard with an errant swipe that must have lingered over the hide-keyboard key
for too long, I quickly got annoyed at how the undocked keyboard sat in the way of Safari’s shortcuts to frequently-visited pages.
The second option, “Split,” can be a little more useful. It cleaves the keyboard in two while also moving it to the undocked position for easier thumb-typing, especially on larger iPads. For some of you, it may also summon memories of the split ergonomic keyboards that had a brief heyday in the 1990s.
To reverse either change and go back to the standard keyboard position and layout, tap and hold the hide-keyboard button and select either “Dock” or “Dock and Merge.”
If you don’t want to see either of these options again, open the Settings app, tap “General” in its left-hand pane and then tap “Keyboard” in the right-hand pane. Tap the slider to the right of “Split Keyboard” so it’s no longer green.
(FYI: Not all keyboard settings live under that corner of the Settings app. Others, such as the option to have the keyboard’s letters appear in uppercase all the time, are squirreled away under the “General” section’s “Accessibility” category.)
You also retain the option of dumping Apple’s keyboard entirely and switching to somebody else’s. And the support for third-party keyboards that Apple added in iOS 8 and made less buggy in iOS 9 got a little more useful with the debut Thursday of Google’s Gboard.
This free alternative keyboard allows you to “gesture type” by tracing a path from letter to letter with your fingertip, just as you can in Google’s Android keyboard and in third-party keyboards like Nuance’s Swype and Microsoft’s SwiftKey.
Like those competing apps, Gboard also learns your vocabulary--but Google says it stores that personalized data on your iPhone or iPad. The only text it sends to Google are the Web searches you can enter using its built-in search shortcut, which doubles as a tool to find the appropriate emoji or animated GIF for your next round of post-literate communication.
