How to draw a directed graph

Several recent tools for visualizing software and information engineering problems have used directed graphs as a basic model. Thus considerable interest has arisen in algorithms for drawing directed graphs so that they are easy to understand and remember. The paper defines three aesthetic criteria for drawings of directed graphs, and discusses a general method for obtaining drawings according to these criteria. Several recent algorithms to draw directed graphs are instances of this general method. The aesthetic criteria can be viewed as goals of optimization problems. Each step of the general method aims to achieve one of the criteria by solving these optimization problems. The authors discuss the current state of knowledge of each of these problems