2023/04/14 by van Wageningen, Simon, Mchedlidze, Tamara, Telea, Alexandru
#Computational Geometry (cs.CG) #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.07274
Planar drawings of graphs tend to be favored over non-planar drawings. Testing planarity and creating a planar layout of a planar graph can be done in linear time. However, creating readable drawings of nearly planar graphs remains a challenge. We therefore seek to answer which edges of nearly planar graphs create clutter in their drawings generated by mainstream graph drawing algorithms. We present a heuristic to identify problematic edges in nearly planar graphs and adjust their weights in order to produce higher quality layouts with spring-based drawing algorithms. Our experiments show that our heuristic produces significantly higher quality drawings for augmented grid graphs, augmented triangulations, and deep triangulations.