Grid Embedding of 4-Connected Plane Graphs

A straight line grid embedding of a plane graph G is a drawing of G such that the vertices are drawn at grid points and the edges are drawn as nonintersecting straight line segments. In this paper we show that if a 4-connected plane graph G has at least four vertices on its external face, then G can be embedded on a grid of size such that and , where n is the number of vertices of G. Such an embedding can be computed in linear time. Received March 30, 1995, and in revised form January 3, 1996.