Upward Planar Drawings with Three and More Slopes

03/11/2021

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by   Jonathan Klawitter, et al.

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We study upward planar straight-line drawings that use only a constant number of slopes. In particular, we are interested in whether a given directed graph with maximum in- and outdegree at most k admits such a drawing with k slopes. We show that this is in general NP-hard to decide for outerplanar graphs (k = 3) and planar graphs (k ≥ 3). On the positive side, for cactus graphs deciding and constructing a drawing can be done in polynomial time. Furthermore, we can determine the minimum number of slopes required for a given tree in linear time and compute the corresponding drawing efficiently.