sections: - title: Download and set-up level: 3 items: - type: sub-section data: title: Bower level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: 'The easiest way to get started with Chartist.js is by using bower:' - type: code data: lang: bash code: bower install chartist --save - type: text data: text: > The bower package contains the JavaScript library, CSS as well as the Sass (SCSS) files. You can then integrate the desired dependencies in your project and start using them immediately. - type: sub-section data: title: One, two, three, CSS! level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > The quickest way to get things up and running is by using the Chartist.js CSS files. The CSS is compiled from the Sass files with the default class names which are also configured in the JavaScript library. You can then override the default styles or modify the CSS file, however, for customization it's recommended to use the Sass version of Chartist.js. - type: code-snippet data: id: simple-start lang: html - type: heading data: level: 5 title: Use a CDN alternatively - type: text data: text: > If you'd like to get started even faster you can also use a CDN to load Chartist.js. The awesome people at jsDelivr provide a fantastic job in hosting libraries from over 42 POP Locations around the world! They always update Chartist.js to the latest version immediately and they do all that for free! Check out the jsDeliver website for more information. - type: code-snippet data: id: simple-start-cdn lang: html button: Show CDN Code - type: sub-section data: title: The Sass way level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > If you like to customize your charts you can either remove the CSS fully and write your own selectors using the Chartist.js Sass mixins or you just use the Chartist.js Sass settings file to customize the look and feel of your charts. - type: text data: text: > Styling inline SVG with CSS is a breeze and you should also consider writing your own selectors for your charts and using the Sass mixins. You can read more about using the Sass mixins in the advanced section. - type: text data: text: > To customize the style of your charts using the Sass settings file you should copy the settings file to your own Sass folder. - type: code data: lang: bash code: cp bower_components/chartist/dist/scss/settings/_chartist-settings.scss styles - type: text data: text: > Then just import your copy of the settings file before you import the chartist.scss file and change the settings in your copy as desired. - type: code-snippet data: id: custom-include lang: scss - type: heading data: level: 5 title: Default settings - type: text data: text: > The settings file contains all relevant variables used in the mixins and while generating the default classes. You can simply change the settings for styling your own charts. If you want to override certain settings based on state or pseeudo selectors, you can use the individual mixins to only override specific styles. - type: text data: text: > Take a look at the settings to see how to customize the style of the defalt Chartist.js class selectors. - type: code-snippet data: id: default-sass-settings button: Show default settings path: src/styles/settings/_chartist-settings.scss lang: scss - title: Create your first chart level: 3 items: - type: text data: text: > In this section you'll go through a simple example of how to use Chartist.js in your project. You'll learn the default stages you go through when creating and customizing a basic line chart. If you'd like to see more in depth and advanced examples you should check out the advanced section or the examples page. - type: sub-section data: title: As simple as it can get level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > Chartist provides you a very simple API to get started, however, while trying to follow the best practice of relying on standards and clear separation of concerns it sometimes needs a small mind shift in order to understand how things are meant to work within Chartist. Instead of specifying your colors, line width and other style related things in the JavaScript API, you'll need to use CSS in order to control your appearance. - type: sub-section data: title: Creating a chart using aspect ratios level: 5 items: - type: text data: text: > Because of the nature of responsive design it's important to understand that blocks in design like images, videos and similar content need to be able to scale and adapt to the media. In order for an element to scale, you need to rely on a certain aspect ratios (like 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 etc.) rather than specifying a fixed width and height. - type: text data: text: > To designers this Idea is absolutely not new, but to developers this might be at first. However, when a designer talks to a developer about the images being 320x240 on this page and 300x200 on that element, he actually just translated his idea of using 4:3 and 3:2 images into pixels. - type: text data: text: > With Chartist you can specify those ratios directly on containers without the need to calculate any fixed dimensions. In order to create a chart that is using the aspect ratio of a golden section you can just add the class .ct-golden-section to your container where you initialize Chartist. - type: text data: text: > Here is a list of all available container ratios (If using the Sass version of Chartist you can also easily add others): - type: table data: id: container-aspect-ratio-classes button: Show available aspect ratios header: - Container class - Ratio rows: - - .ct-square - '1' - - .ct-minor-second - '15:16' - - .ct-major-second - '8:9' - - .ct-minor-third - '5:6' - - .ct-major-third - '4:5' - - .ct-perfect-fourth - '3:4' - - .ct-perfect-fifth - '2:3' - - .ct-minor-sixth - '5:8' - - .ct-golden-section - '1:1.618' - - .ct-major-sixth - '3:5' - - .ct-minor-seventh - '9:16' - - .ct-major-seventh - '8:15' - - .ct-octave - '1:2' - - .ct-major-tenth - '2:5' - - .ct-major-eleventh - '3:8' - - .ct-major-twelfth - '1:3' - - .ct-double-octave - '1:4' - type: text data: text: > Use the following HTML code to specify a container with one of the above aspect ratio classes. - type: code data: code: '
' lang: html - type: text data: text: > When using a fixed aspect ratio container you can then simply initialize your chart without specifying any width or height in the options. - type: code-snippet data: id: simple-start-aspect-ratio-chart lang: js - type: sub-section data: title: Creating a chart with fixed dimensions level: 5 items: - type: text data: text: > In order to create a simple line chart with fixed width and height you only need to have a container element and initialize Chartist.js on it. Give the container the class ct-chart so that it will get the default styles (if you don't use your own classes). - type: code-snippet data: id: simple-start-fixed-chart lang: js - type: sub-section data: title: More than one chart on my page? level: 5 items: - type: text data: text: > The example above uses the chartist default class to select the element where the chart should be created. This class is important for applying the right styles in the CSS of Chartist. If you need to create individual charts on one page, you should use IDs to initialize them separately. - type: code-snippet data: id: two-charts lang: html - type: sub-section data: title: The configuration of your chart level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > Chartist.js is built very flexible and almost everything within your charts can be configured. In the default settings (that you can check in the API Documentation) you'll get some predefined defaults applied to your charts. - type: text data: text: > You can always override the default settings of your charts by passing in a configuration object at creation time. - type: example-chart data: id: simple-configuration-chart classes: ct-golden-section show-code-button: Show code and comments - type: sub-section data: title: Responsive sugar topping level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > Responsive web design is all based on media queries as you are probably already aware. Media queries are great and they help you to define media related conditions that you can use to apply different styles for different media. - type: text data: text: > Sometimes it's also required to have different behavior on certain media and it's possible that a specific component of your web site should behave in an other way on a small media than on a large one. Luckily there is window.matchMedia in your browser that comes to the rescue. With matchMedia it's possible to let your javascript react differently based on CSS3 media queries. - type: heading data: level: 5 title: Responsive setting overrides - type: text data: text: > Configuring different chart behavior for various media is made simple with an override mechanism. The priority of the override mechanism is based on order of specification of the matching media queries. - type: text data: text: > The following example uses different label interpolations (to save some space) on small media as well as different spacing between the bars of the bar chart series. Resize your browser window to see the effect. - type: example-chart data: id: example-simple-bar classes: ct-golden-section type: Bar show-code-button: Show code and comments - type: hint data: title: Cross-browser support classes: hint-cross-browser text: > For IE9 you need to use a matchMedia polyfill. You should take a look at Paul Irish's matchMedia polyfill. Make sure you include matchMedia.js as well as matchMedia.addListener.js as always both are needed to polyfill the full specification of window.matchMedia. - type: sub-section data: title: Different configuration for different series level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > Chartist also allows you to add specific configuration overrides for your series. This is useful if you want to combine different looks for your series on the same chart. - type: text data: text: > You can even take this one step further by again overriding your series configuration in some responsive settings overrides. This sounds complicated but it actually is very simple. Check the example code with inline comments below to see how easy it is. - type: example-chart data: id: example-line-series-override classes: ct-golden-section show-code-button: Show code - title: Styling your chart level: 3 items: - type: text data: text: > You should always use the power of CSS to make your data pop into your visitors eyes. I know I’m telling this over and over but it’s all about a clean separation of concerns. In this chapter you’ll find some useful information on how to style your charts with CSS. - type: sub-section data: title: Customizing the default CSS level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > Chartist comes with a highly customizable Sass file that allows you to customize all sorts of appearance relevant things on your charts including colours used for series, line styles, thickness and other properties. If you have the advantage of having a Sass build process at your disposal, I highly recommend you to use the Sass version of Chartist instead of the already prebuilt CSS. For more information on how to use the Sass version please check out the Sass way of Chartist. - type: text data: text: > Chartist generates predefined classes for series by default. Those class names are alpha numerated and always start with ct-series-a, where the letter a will be iterated with each series count (a, b, c, d etc.). To address a specific series in styling, you’ll need to create some styles for the corresponding series class name. - type: text data: text: > Here is a list of selectors from the different chart types with some comments to explain what properties can be used to influence the visual style of your charts. - type: sub-section data: title: Line chart level: 5 items: - type: code-snippet data: id: custom-style-line-chart lang: css - type: sub-section data: title: Bar chart level: 5 items: - type: code-snippet data: id: custom-style-bar-chart lang: css - type: sub-section data: title: Pie chart level: 5 items: - type: code-snippet data: id: custom-style-pie-chart lang: css - type: sub-section data: title: Donut chart level: 5 items: - type: code-snippet data: id: custom-style-donut-chart lang: css - type: sub-section data: title: Colour up your charts level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > Colour is a core attribute of appearance and as you already know, we believe in strong separation of concerns in web development. Therefore, Chartist does not include any options within the JavaScript API to control colour of your charts. - type: text data: text: > This might first seem very inconvenient, but you’ll agree that it’s the right choice once you need to change some colours in your web project where you’d need to go through some nasty find-and-replace adventures in your JavaScript files to fix some colour mismatches. - type: text data: text: > The prebuilt CSS version of Chartist ships with 15 default colours that will be applied to your chart series elements. If you just want to override some of these colours I recommend you use the information found in how to customize the default CSS of Chartist. - type: text data: text: > The following example illustrates how you’d override the colours of your line chart line and point elements, within the two first sieries (ct-series-a and ct-series-b). - type: code-snippet data: id: colour-override-line-chart lang: css - type: text data: text: > Note that on SVG elements there are two CSS properties for colourization. For strokes you should use the stroke property and assign a CSS colour value. For fill areas you can use the fill property. More information can be found in the above topics. - type: sub-section data: title: Dynamic colouring level: 5 items: - type: text data: text: > Often, predefined classes which can be used to colour your charts are fine but sometimes CSS is not flexible enough to control all facets of dynamic appearance. While we could build semantic classes like level1, level2, level3 and so on, we could then assign a class dynamically, but still we’d need to rely on discrete values defined in CSS. One lack of CSS today is that it does not incorporate dynamic values like mouse position or placeholder variables that can be linked to JavaScript. - type: text data: text: > So, how do you go about your heat map chart or dynamically calculated line chart strokes based on your data? - type: text data: text: > Chartist offers you a powerful tool for such kind of chart manipulations. The intrusive event pipeline of Chartist allows you to hook into a draw event that allows you to modify all your charts elements on the go while they’re drawn. - type: text data: text: > The following live code example shows you how to make a dynamically coloured chart based on some data. Please go ahead and play around with the example, that’s what live coding is for! For more information on how to use the Chartist.Svg API, please check the API documentation. - type: live-example data: title: Using draw events to modify chart elements level: 5 id: example-dynamic-colours classes: ct-golden-section intro: > By using the intrusive event pipeline of Chartist, you can easily change the behaviour of your charts in a consistent and convenient way. - title: Advanced level: 3 items: - type: text data: text: > In the following chapter you'll find some advanced usage examples that might be of interesst for you. Chartist is very flexible because it relies on standard technology. This also means that you will need to implement certain things yourself. This topic should cover some of these use-cases and give you some basic idea why and how to implement certain functionality. - type: sub-section data: title: Animations using Chartist.Svg level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > Usually we recommend using CSS for animations as it's closer to a clean separation of concerns. However, sometimes you would want to animate SVG properties that are not available in CSS to animate. For this purpose we have added a simple but powerful animation API that allows you to create SMIL animations in a more convenient way. - type: text data: text: > In combination with the draw events of Chartist the animations are a very powerful and flexible tool. You can intercept almost any step in chartist and if there is an SVG element involved you can animate it using Chartist.Svg.animate. - type: text data: text: > The following simple example shows you how to created a delayed fade in effect for the a scatter chart. You can also edit the example to play around with the settings. - type: live-example data: title: Some SVG Animations can only be done with SMIL level: 5 id: example-simple-svg-animation classes: ct-golden-section intro: > Edit this example to figure out how to tweak animations. The force is strong in you young padawan! - type: sub-section data: title: Switching axis type level: 4 items: - type: text data: text: > The default configuration of the line chart is that it will use a step based X-Axis and an automatic linear scale for the Y-Axis. This is all happening under the hood of Chartist and already satisfies a lot of use-cases. - type: text data: text: > Sometimes though, it's not enough to have a fixed step chart and you'd need something a bit more complex. Something that allows you to plot those values along the X- and Y-Axis, instead of just the Y-Axis. Sometimes, you'd also want to specify the ticks on your chart manually rather than having them auto calculated from Chartist. - type: text data: text: > Of course Chartist wouldn't let you down with all those ideas you have in mind on how to visualize your data! - type: sub-section data: title: A line chart is only 1-dimensional?! level: 5 items: - type: text data: text: > By default, Chartist uses Chartist.StepAxis for the X-Axis and Chartist.AutoScaleAxis for the Y-Axis. Please read the API documentation if you'd like to get more details, or available options on axis configuration. - type: text data: text: > The step based axis will not use any value for projection but rather rely on the index of the given value to determine the position. This is fine for discrete steps of one dimensional data, like we know it from regular Chartist charts: - type: code-snippet data: id: 1-dimension-values lang: js - type: text data: text: > What really happens with such one dimensional series data under the hood is that it will be transformed into two dimensional data like so: - type: code-snippet data: id: 2-dimensions-values lang: js - type: text data: text: > You can see that Chartist will automatically convert one dimensional data into two dimensional values where the previous value is assigned to y and x will be set to undefined. As the default axis for projecting the x value is a Chartist.StepAxis that relies on the value index rather than the value, this is perfectly fine for the default setup. - type: sub-section data: title: Creating an XY-plot chart level: 5 items: - type: text data: text: > In order to plot on the X-Axis too, we'd need to switch the standard axis type Chartist.StepAxis to something more continuous. Let's create a full fledged auto scale chart that scales both the Y- and X-Axis automatically using the Chartist.AutoScaleAxis! - type: live-example data: title: Configure your axis type level: 6 id: example-axis-auto classes: ct-golden-section intro: > Note that we have just specified the X-Axis because the Y-Axis is configured to Chartist.AutoScaleAxis by default. - type: text data: text: > A few things are different in this chart. Because the labels array of our data is just used to be mapped as ticks option for the default Chartist.StepAxis X-Axis, we can completely remove the labels from our data, once we use a different axis than the step based one. Also you can see now from the data series is that we are specifying 2-dimensional values directly. - type: sub-section data: title: Fixed stuff can be sweet too! level: 5 items: - type: text data: text: > The following example shows how to create an axis with some fixed ticks. The Chartist.FixedScaleAxis can be used to create a more rudimentary continuous linear scale, where ticks can be fixed either with an array of values or with a divisor. For the detailed options please check the API documentation. - type: live-example data: title: Unleash your creativity... level: 6 id: example-axis-fixed-and-auto classes: ct-golden-section intro: > Let's say we'd like to fix a few ticks on the Y-Axis on our chart as those are the only ones we're interested in. The X-Axis should be continuous too, but let's make that axis a Chartist.AutoScaleAxis.