JFreeChart
JFreeChart have several advantages over Flash Charts. JFreeChart is a java library that produces images in various formats: gif, jpeg, png. As a result these charts can be incorporated into PDF, Excel and RTF reports. Second advantage comes from Apple - Adobe Flash war. Flash charts will not work on iPhone and iPad. So there are some reasons to use JFreeChart.
Blurred Charts
The case when charts in Pentaho are blurred is common enough. I designed a report with a chart in it with the latest Pentaho Report Designer 3.6.1, placed it on a dashboard, where it produced in HTML format, and added pdf export button. When I open my dashboard in Firefox the chart looks blurred. This is mainly concern to any text that is on the chart. Ok, you can understand these charts, but this is not a thing your customer will like. On the other hand charts exported to PDF looks very neat. Also when opened with Internet Explorer charts looks nice.
How to fix it?
The problem here is in the way Firefox scaling images. Chart images are usually in high quality, and their size can be twice larger then the place for a chart on html page. So Firefox forced to downscale these images. And here, for the blame of Firefox, it can't do that nice. Firefox just don't have a good image scaling algorithm. You can check a bug, which wasn't fixed at the time of this writing.
But the good news is that Firefox have a "bad" images scaling algorithm that can correctly downscale our chart! I'll explain it:
<img> HTML element have a property image-rendering. In Firefox this property can be set to any of 5 values: auto, inherit, optimizeSpeed, optimizeQuality, -moz-crisp-edges. Currently only two rendering algorithms are used. Bilinear resampling for values: auto and optimizeQuality. Nearest neighbor resampling for optimizeSpeed and -moz-crisp-edges values. And here is a trick: Nearest neighbor resampling works better to images with sharp edges.
So all you need is just add following style for all chart images:
<style type="text/css">
img {
image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges
}
</style>
This is how looks blurred image(you will see blurring in Firefox only):
And here is how looks sharp image(for me it's looks even better then in IE):
Sharp image can be rendered with problems if you changed zoom in a browser.
Why pentaho can't fix it?
Ok, I don't know. May be it consider this bug as not important. But it is certainly a disadvantage, which may scare some potential customers. JasperReports don't have this issue, however I don't sure which way they overcome it.
