Recommendation for drawing graphs and creating tables, saving as PDF

[Jan Erik Moström]

I'm doing something that I've never done before and need some advise for 
suitable libraries.

I want to

a) create diagrams similar to this one 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kyh7rxbcogvecs1/graph.png?dl=0 (but with more 
nodes) and save them as PDFs or some format that can easily be converted 
to PDFs

b) generate documents that contains text, lists, and tables with some 
styling. Here my idea was to save the info as markdown and create PDFs 
from those files, but if there is some other tools that gives me better 
control over the tables I'm interested in knowing about them.

I looked around around but could only find two types of libraries for a) 
libraries for creating histograms, bar charts, etc, b) very basic 
drawing tools that requires me to figure out the layout etc. I would 
prefer a library that would allow me to state "connect A to B", "connect 
C to B", "connect B to D", and the library would do the whole layout.

The closest I've found it to use markdown and mermaid or graphviz but 
... PDFs (perhaps I should just forget about PDFs, then it should be 
enough to send people to a web page)

(and yes, I could obviously use LaTeX ...)

= jem