Rectangular drawings of plane graphs without designated corners

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of finding rectangular drawings of plane graphs, in which each vertex is drawn as a point, each edge is drawn as a horizontal or a vertical line segment, and the contour of each face is drawn as a rectangle. A graph is a 2–3 plane graph if it is a plane graph and each vertex has degree 3 except the vertices on the outer face which have degree 2 or 3. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a rectangular drawing has been known only for the case where exactly four vertices of degree 2 on the outer face are designated as corners in a 2–3 plane graph G. In this paper we establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a rectangular drawing of G for the general case in which no vertices are designated as corners. We also give a linear-time algorithm to find a rectangular drawing of G if it exists.