What is chartist?

Chartist is a JavaScript charting library for drawing responsive charts on web pages. It renders charts as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rather than on a canvas element, which means the charts can be styled with regular CSS, scale cleanly to any size, and remain accessible to screen readers and other tools that understand the web's standard document structure. The library was created in response to what its authors saw as common problems with other charting tools: some use canvas (which does not support CSS styling as well as SVG), some ship large file sizes, some are hard to customize, and some are unfriendly to designers. Chartist aims to stay small, simple, and transparent about what it does and does not handle. The scope is intentionally narrow. Chartist handles drawing the chart itself, SVG layout, and the JavaScript API for passing data and configuration. It does not include its own event system, custom label rendering, or interactive behaviors, those are left to standard HTML and JavaScript. The idea is to avoid duplicating things the browser already does well. Getting started is a single npm install command. You then import the specific chart type you want, point it at an HTML element, pass in your data labels and series values, and optionally configure axes or styling. The README shows a bar chart example that takes about ten lines. A plugin system exists but the v1 plugin documentation is listed as coming soon. The full docs and live examples are at chartist.dev.