Spider Chart (High Chart) in rails with Prawn PDF How to generate?

Question

I want to implement a spider chart (High chart) in my rails application inside pdf for PDF I've used Prawn PDF gem. So anyone has any idea about implementing a spider chart in pdf. I also have a reference screenshot of the high chart spider chart the same chart I want to implement in my rails app pdf thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As you can find on the SO forum a lot of users suggest to use wkhtmltopdf to do it. Suggested solutions:

• Can I use highcharts in a pdf generate with prawn in Rails?

• Wkhtmltopdf fails to printing SVG path (highchart)

• Using wkhtmltopdf with highcharts shows blank chart

And here is an example of how to create a spider chart in the JavaScript which you should easily rebuild in your project:

Demo: https://jsfiddle.net/BlackLabel/n1e0pmtv/

Highcharts.chart('container', {

  chart: {
    polar: true,
    type: 'line'
  },

  xAxis: {
    categories: ['test1', 'test2', 'test3'],
    tickmarkPlacement: 'on',
    lineWidth: 0
  },

  yAxis: {
    gridLineInterpolation: 'polygon',
    lineWidth: 0,
    min: 0
  },

  series: [{
    name: 'test',
    data: [43000, 19000, 60000],
    pointPlacement: 'on'
  }],
});

I am also attaching the link to the blog with instruction of implementing Highcharts with Ruby.

https://www.highcharts.com/blog/post/i-am-ruby-developer-how-can-i-use-highcharts/

Answer 2

There's prawn-svg that can render SVGs into prawn, and so you can make a svg graph and render it inside your pdf.

Highcharts can export SVGs, but to run you should have a javascript runtime, which is possible, but will take some effort to setup and run. So some ruby-level chart library may be more preferable (it you can find one, as most current charting libraries are for client side javacsript).

Easier solution is to use a html-to-pdf converter, like wkhtmltopdf, that popupar wicked-pdf gem is based on. It runs a headless browser, renders the page and exports to pdf. The process is much slower, because for each pdf a separate process with browser in it has to run, and resulting pdf is larger, but you can use familiar web techniques in markup and reuse html views.