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Abstract: A Right Angle Crossing Graph (also called a RAC graph for short) is a graph that has a straight-line drawing where any two crossing edges are orthogonal to each other. A -planar graph is a graph that has a drawing where every edge is crossed at most once. This paper studies the combinatorial relationship between the family of RAC graphs and the family of -planar graphs. It is proved that: (1) all RAC graphs having maximal edge density belong to the intersection of the two families; and (2) there is no inclusion relationship between the two families. As a by-product of the proof technique, it is also shown that every RAC graph with maximal edge density is the union of two maximal planar graphs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Cognitive experiments show that humans can read graph drawings in which all edge crossings are at right angles equally well as they can read planar drawings; they also show that the readability of a drawing is heavily affected by the number of bends along the edges. A graph visualization whose edges can only cross perpendicularly is called a RAC (Right Angle Crossing) drawing. This paper initiates the study of combinatorial and algorithmic questions related to the problem of computing RAC drawings with few bends per edge. Namely, we study the interplay between number of bends per edge and total number of edges in RAC drawings. We establish upper and lower bounds on these quantities by considering two classical graph drawing scenarios: The one where the algorithm can choose the combinatorial embedding of the input graph and the one where this embedding is fixed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]