If you want the labels to be retained for the tooltip, but not displayed below the bars the following hack might be useful. I made this change for use on an private intranet application and have not tested it for efficiency or side-effects, but it did what I needed.
At about line 71 in chart.js add a property to hide the bar labels:
// Boolean - Whether to show x-axis labels
barShowLabels: true,
At about line 1500 use that property to suppress changing this.endPoint (it seems that other portions of the calculation code are needed as chunks of the chart disappeared or were rendered incorrectly if I disabled anything more than this line).
if (this.xLabelRotation > 0) {
if (this.ctx.barShowLabels) {
this.endPoint -= Math.sin(toRadians(this.xLabelRotation)) * originalLabelWidth + 3;
} else {
// don't change this.endPoint
}
}
At about line 1644 use the property to suppress the label rendering:
if (ctx.barShowLabels) {
ctx.fillText(label, 0, 0);
}
I'd like to make this change to the Chart.js source but aren't that familiar with git and don't have the time to test rigorously so would rather avoid breaking anything.