React-pdf-charts NPM

Warning This library is in early development and may not be production ready. Please give it a try and provide your feedback in the issues.

The problem

One of the best ways to generate PDFs is using react-pdf. Unfortunately react-pdf has several major annoying bugs that makes rendering SVG charts very difficult. This library attempts to ease the pain and provide a possible workaround until those bugs are fixed.

This solution

This library provides a wrapper component that allows you to use popular SVG charting libraries (like recharts) in your react-pdf PDF documents. The wrapper will convert all generated <svg> DOM elements into compatible react-pdf SVG image elements. The library will also attempt to workaround common bugs and limitations gracefully.

The outcome is that you'll be able to have PDF documents with beautiful charts like this:

Installation

This module is distributed via npm which is bundled with node and should be installed as one of your project's dependencies:

npm install react-pdf-charts

Usage

import ReactPDFChart from "react-pdf-charts";

const data = [
  {
    name: "Page A",
    uv: 4000,
    pv: 2400,
    amt: 2400,
  },
  {
    name: "Page B",
    uv: 3000,
    pv: 1398,
    amt: 2210,
  },
  {
    name: "Page C",
    uv: 2000,
    pv: 9800,
    amt: 2290,
  },
  {
    name: "Page D",
    uv: 2780,
    pv: 3908,
    amt: 2000,
  },
  {
    name: "Page E",
    uv: 1890,
    pv: 4800,
    amt: 2181,
  },
  {
    name: "Page F",
    uv: 2390,
    pv: 3800,
    amt: 2500,
  },
  {
    name: "Page G",
    uv: 3490,
    pv: 4300,
    amt: 2100,
  },
];

const SomeComponent = () => (
  <ReactPDFChart>
    <LineChart data={data} height={300} width={500}>
      <XAxis dataKey="name" />
      <YAxis />
      <CartesianGrid stroke="#eee" strokeDasharray="5" />
      <Line type="monotone" dataKey="uv" stroke="#8884d8" />
      <Line type="monotone" dataKey="pv" stroke="#82ca9d" />
    </LineChart>
  </ReactPDFChart>
);

From there you can pass SomeComponent to react-pdf to be rendered either on the server or the client via its rendering APIs.

Props

debug

boolean | defaults to false

Enables react-pdf debugging mode for the outer wrapper element.

chartStyle

{} | optional, some base recharts styles are applied by default

An optional Stylesheet that maps web CSS class names to whatever react-pdf styles you wish to replace those classes with.

The idea is that popular SVG charting libraries (like recharts) will apply various classes to its elements (eg. <span class="recharts-default-legend">...</span>). Since class names aren't supported in react-pdf, this prop allows to you replace those class names with custom styling. The react-pdf-charts library will convert any matches class names to the corresponding react-pdf styles.

style

{} | optional, no default

An optional style that will get applied to the outer element of the wrapper component.

Examples

You can check the working examples in the /examples folder.

You can re-run the examples by downloading this repository, running bun install to install dependencies, and then running bun start to re-generate the .pdf files in the examples folder.

There's also /examples/client which is a small little web server which you can use to test react-pdf's web-only APIs like PDFViewer and PDFDownloadLink. To run that example, use cd examples/client && bun install && bun start.

You can also play around with the library on StackBlitz here.

Known Issues

Only recharts and victory have been tested. In theory react-pdf-charts should work with others charting libraries (like highcharts) but those haven't been tested yet.
When rendering <Bar /> and <Area /> charts with recharts using client-side rendering (ie. <PDFViewer> or <PDFDownloadLink>), it's important to set isAnimationActive={false} on your <Bar /> compoments otherwise the chart will not render correctly (more info). Perhaps in the future react-pdf-charts could auto-detect this and disable animations automatically.