Symptoms

Confluence is unable to render charts from Chart Macro and displays this error message:

Error formatting macro: chart:java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart

Cause

There is a problem in utilising JFreeChart, the library used by Confluence to generate charts as an image.

Resolution

If Confluence is running on Unix/Linux, make sure the environment has X11 Support.

Otherwise, make sure Confluence runs on an Oracle JDK. OpenJDK is known to cause this problem. See our Supported Platforms.