We introduce L-drawings, a novel paradigm for representing directed graphs
aiming at combining the readability features of orthogonal drawings with the
expressive power of matrix representations. In an L-drawing, vertices have
exclusive x- and y-coordinates and edges consist of two segments, one
exiting the source vertically and one entering the destination horizontally.
We study the problem of computing L-drawings using minimum ink. We prove its
NP-completeness and provide a heuristics based on a polynomial-time algorithm
that adds a vertex to a drawing using the minimum additional ink. We performed
an experimental analysis of the heuristics which confirms its effectiveness.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure
