Fixing the cutecharts Python Package

A mild inconvenience emerges

When my partner in crime was writing their post on finding fulfillment, they wanted to use this cute data visualisation library named cutecharts. However, to their disappointment, they were unable to get legends to show when rendering the graphs.

Investigating the issue

They requested my assistance and we both investigated the issue. Going on the library repo, I could see in their documentation that a legend was indeed possible, and this was corroborated by other old blog posts demonstrating the same thing.

I inspected the HTML in hopes of spotting some hidden legend setting that was accidentally set to invisible, but didn’t find anything. The only thing I did find was that the render includes a script which references an npm URL (more on this later).

For some context, cutecharts is a python wrapper of the chart.xkcd npm package, and we found that even the original library was not rendering the legend, meaning the issue originated from there.

On the chart.xkcd repo, I then saw that there were a few recent git commits which referenced fixes related to the legend.

Going to the npm version history, I could see that these most recent commits coincide with a version update. I also noted that a previous version had the majority of downloads. Therefore, I concluded that the previous evidence of a legend showing up surely must have been rendered on this older version.

Solving the problem

Now, remember when I discovered that the HTML references an npm script? Well it looks like this:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/chart.xkcd@1.1/dist/chart.xkcd.min.js

Note the semantic versioning referencing 1.1 (which means 1.1.*), meaning the version we were using was different to what previous people documented.

I knew this URL must have been generated by the Python wrapper, so by searching for the URL in the cutecharts repo source code, I found the file and tweaked the version on my local machine, by editing the 1.1 to 1.1.13. Lo and behold, the legend showed up once more.