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Does Graph Structure Affect Drawing Quality?

Authors Gavin J. Mooney , Michael Wybrow , Helen C. Purchase

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LIPIcs.GD.2026.25.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Human-centered computing → Graph drawings
Keywords
  • Graph structure
  • Graph drawing
  • Metric landscape
  • Readability metrics

Metrics

Abstract

Graph drawing aesthetic metrics (angular resolution, edge crossings, stress, and so on) quantify the visual quality of a graph drawing, and recent work has characterised their distributions across large drawing corpora. That analysis takes no account of the structure of the source graphs: the variation between graphs (driven by structural properties of the topology) is collapsed, together with the variation within a graph (driven by the choice of layout algorithm) into a single distribution per metric. This paper accounts for graph structure: for a fixed graph G with specified structural properties, what region of the eleven-dimensional metric-space is reachable, and how does that region depend on the structural properties?
We construct a stratified corpus of 89,493 graphs spanning generated families, established benchmarks, real-world networks, and curator-laid-out graphs from the literature, and lay each out with 18 algorithms drawn from the force-directed, layered, orthogonal, and structural families. Each graph’s reachable region is summarised by the minimum, maximum, mean, and range of 11 aesthetic metric values across its drawings. We then analyse drawing-level metric values using structural properties together with a layout-family encoding.
This analysis allows us to determine the extent to which a graph’s structural properties and the choice of layout family predict readability metrics, and to identify where graph-level metric ranges suggest structural limits on attainable layout quality. These results are important in setting expectations for graph drawing quality, for optimisation approaches, and for choosing graphs for which a specified layout quality is desirable.

Cite As Get BibTex

Gavin J. Mooney, Michael Wybrow, and Helen C. Purchase. Does Graph Structure Affect Drawing Quality?. In 34th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 396, pp. 25:1-25:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.GD.2026.25

Author Details

Gavin J. Mooney
  • Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Michael Wybrow
  • Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Helen C. Purchase
  • Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Supplementary Materials

References

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