The Complexity of Drawing a Graph in a Polygonal Region

We prove that the following problem is complete for the existential theory of the reals: Given a planar graph and a polygonal region, with some vertices of the graph assigned to points on the boundary of the region, place the remaining vertices to create a planar straight-line drawing of the graph inside the region. This strengthens an NP-hardness result by Patrignani on extending partial planar graph drawings. Our result is one of the first showing that a problem of drawing planar graphs with straight-line edges is hard for the existential theory of the reals. The complexity of the problem is open in the case of a simply connected region. We also show that, even for integer input coordinates, it is possible that drawing a graph in a polygonal region requires some vertices to be placed at irrational coordinates. By contrast, the coordinates are known to be bounded in the special case of a convex region, or for drawing a path in any polygonal region.

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