Outerplanar graph drawings with few slopes

We consider straight-line outerplanar drawings of outerplanar graphs in which a small number of distinct edge slopes are used, that is, the segments representing edges are parallel to a small number of directions. We prove that $\Delta-1$ edge slopes suffice for every outerplanar graph with maximum degree $\Delta\ge 4$. This improves on the previous bound of $O(\Delta^5)$, which was shown for planar partial 3-trees, a superclass of outerplanar graphs. The bound is tight: for every $\Delta\ge 4$ there is an outerplanar graph with maximum degree $\Delta$ that requires at least $\Delta-1$ distinct edge slopes in an outerplanar straight-line drawing.Comment: Major revision of the whole pape

Planar Octilinear Drawings with One Bend Per Edge

In octilinear drawings of planar graphs, every edge is drawn as an alternating sequence of horizontal, vertical and diagonal ($45^\circ$) line-segments. In this paper, we study octilinear drawings of low edge complexity, i.e., with few bends per edge. A $k$-planar graph is a planar graph in which each vertex has degree less or equal to $k$. In particular, we prove that every 4-planar graph admits a planar octilinear drawing with at most one bend per edge on an integer grid of size $O(n^2) \times O(n)$. For 5-planar graphs, we prove that one bend per edge still suffices in order to construct planar octilinear drawings, but in super-polynomial area. However, for 6-planar graphs we give a class of graphs whose planar octilinear drawings require at least two bends per edge

Upward planar drawings with two slopes

In an upward planar 2-slope drawing of a digraph, edges are drawn as straight-line segments in the upward direction without crossings using only two different slopes. We investigate whether a given upward planar digraph admits such a drawing and, if so, how to construct it. For the fixed embedding scenario, we give a simple characterisation and a linear-time construction by adopting algorithms from orthogonal drawings. For the variable embedding scenario, we describe a linear-time algorithm for single-source digraphs, a quartic-time algorithm for series-parallel digraphs, and a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for general digraphs. For the latter two classes, we make use of SPQR-trees and the notion of upward spirality. As an application of this drawing style, we show how to draw an upward planar phylogenetic network with two slopes such that all leaves lie on a horizontal line

Drawing Cubic Graphs with the Four Basic Slopes

We show that every cubic graph can be drawn in the plane with straight-line edges using only the four basic slopes, {0, π/4, π/2, 3π/4}. We also prove that four slopes have this property if and only if we can draw K4 with them