We prove that the following problem is complete for the existential theory of
the reals: Given a planar graph and a polygonal region, with some vertices of
the graph assigned to points on the boundary of the region, place the remaining
vertices to create a planar straight-line drawing of the graph inside the
region. This strengthens an NP-hardness result by Patrignani on extending
partial planar graph drawings. Our result is one of the first showing that a
problem of drawing planar graphs with straight-line edges is hard for the
existential theory of the reals. The complexity of the problem is open in the
case of a simply connected region.
We also show that, even for integer input coordinates, it is possible that
drawing a graph in a polygonal region requires some vertices to be placed at
irrational coordinates. By contrast, the coordinates are known to be bounded in
the special case of a convex region, or for drawing a path in any polygonal
region.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2018