A better heuristic for orthogonal graph drawings

Abstract

An orthogonal drawing of a graph is an embedding in the plane such that all edges are drawn as sequences of horizontal and vertical segments. We present a linear time and space algorithm to draw any connected graph orthogonally on a grid of size n n with at most 2n + 2 bends. Each edge is bent at most twice. In particular for non-planar and non-biconnected planar graphs, this is a big improvement. The algorithm is very simple, easy to implement, and it handles both planar and non-planar graphs at the same time.