Abstract
We investigate the problem of drawing graphs in 2D
and 3D such that their edges (or only their
vertices) can be covered by few lines or planes. We
insist on straight-line edges and crossing-free
drawings. This problem has many relations to other
challenging graph-drawing problems such as
small-area or small-volume drawings, layered or
track drawings, and drawing graphs with low visual
complexity. While some facts about our problem are
implicit in previous work, this is the first
treatment of the problem in its full generality.
Our contribution is as follows. We show lower
and upper bounds for the numbers of lines and planes
needed for covering drawings of graphs in certain
graph classes. In some cases our bounds are
asymptotically tight; in some cases we are able to
determine exact values. We relate our
parameters to standard combinatorial characteristics
of graphs (such as the chromatic number, treewidth,
or arboricity) and to parameters that have been
studied in graph drawing (such as the track number
or the number of segments appearing in a drawing).
We pay special attention to planar graphs. For
example, we show that there are qplanar graphs that
can be drawn in 3-space on asymptotically fewer
lines than in the plane.
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