Area-efficient planar straight-line drawings of outerplanar graphs Original Research Article

It is important to minimize the area of a drawing of a graph, so that the drawing can fit in a small drawing-space. It is well-known that a planar graph with image vertices admits a planar straight-line grid drawing with image area [H. de Fraysseix, J. Pach, R. Pollack, How to draw a planar graph on a grid, Combinatorica 10(1) (1990) 41–51; W. Schnyder, Embedding planar graphs on the grid, in: Proceedings of the First ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1990, pp. 138–148]. Unfortunately, there is a matching lower-bound of image on the area-requirements of the planar straight-line grid drawings of certain planar graphs. Hence, it is important to investigate important categories of planar graphs to determine if they admit planar straight-line grid drawings with image area.