I’m working on a project where I need to generate PDF reports that include chart visualizations. Currently we’re using phantomjs as our headless browser solution to capture chart images and embed them into PDFs, but the performance is not great.
The main issue is speed - the headless browser approach takes too long for our needs. I’m looking for alternative methods to create charts directly on the server side without relying on any browser automation tools.
Our application runs on .NET/C# stack. Has anyone found a better way to handle this kind of chart generation for PDF exports? Any suggestions would be really helpful.
Had the same performance headaches with our financial reporting about six months back. Switched to ScottPlot and haven’t looked back - thing’s been bulletproof for our .NET backend. It renders charts server-side and spits out bitmap or vector formats with zero browser dependencies. What blew me away was how easy the swap was - replaced our janky PhantomJS setup in half a day. Way faster rendering and memory stays stable even when we throw massive datasets at it. If you need interactive charts, check out LiveCharts2, but ScottPlot handled all our static PDF stuff perfectly. Both play nice with standard PDF tools and the output looks professional.
Had the exact same bottleneck with our enterprise reporting system two years back. Tried a bunch of different solutions and Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET was a game changer - completely killed our browser dependency headaches. Performance jump was crazy good. What took 15-20 seconds with PhantomJS now finishes in under 2 seconds. The library spits out charts as image streams that drop right into your PDFs without any extra rendering nonsense. Also played around with OxyPlot - tons of customization and handles complex data viz really well. Both work great with iTextSharp or PDFSharp. Best part? Everything runs server-side with native .NET, so you dodge all the overhead and stability nightmares that come with headless browsers.
skiaSharp’s definitely worth a look. we ditched phantomjs last year and the performance boost was incredible. it generates charts as bitmap/svg straight in memory - no browser overhead. works great with .net core if that’s your stack.