Graph multidrawing: Finding nice drawings without defining nice

Abstract

This paper proposes a multidrawing approach to graph drawing. Current graph-drawing systems typically produce only one drawing of a graph. By contrast, the multidrawing approach calls for systematically producing many drawings of the same graph, where the drawings presented to the user represent a balance between aesthetics and diversity. This addresses a fundamental problem in graph drawing, namely, how to avoid requiring the user to specify formally and precisely all the characteristics of a single “nice” drawing. We present a proof-of-concept implementation with which we produce diverse selections of symmetric-looking drawings for small graphs.