Maximum bar width in Highcharts column charts

Question

I'm using Highcharts to create some vertical bars (a.k.a. "column charts") a lot like here: highcharts.com/demo/column-basic

Thing is, sometimes there are 30 bars in the chart, sometimes only two. Where then are two really wide bars in the chart, it looks really weird, so the decision was made to set a maximum width for the bars. That way if there are only two then they wouldn't get wider than, say, 50px, but if there were 50 then Highcharts could size them in the way it sees fit.

So my problem is that Highcharts doesn't have a way to explicitly set the maximum width of the columns. Has anyone found a solution to that?

Answer 1

Obviously this question was asked a long time ago when this feature didn't exist, but as of Highcharts 4.1.8 you can do this without any workarounds using the plotOptions.column.maxPointWidth setting:

$('#container').highcharts({
    /* Other chart settings here... */
    plotOptions: {
        column: {
            /* Here is the setting to limit the maximum column width. */
            maxPointWidth: 50
        }
    }
    /* Other chart settings here... */
});

Below is the JSFiddle of the basic column chart example, modified to show this working:

http://jsfiddle.net/vu3dubhb/

And the documentation for this setting is here: http://api.highcharts.com/highcharts#plotOptions.column.maxPointWidth