Research Tools & Interactive Demonstrators | AC Group | TU Wien

Ipe Drawing & Presentation Guide

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Ipe is an extensible vector graphics editor that natively renders LaTeX text and equations. It is widely used in our research group for creating publication-quality figures, academic posters, and conference presentation slides.

🎨 Templates & Tutorials

📄 Presentation Templates (ZIP) – Group-styled slide templates.
🖼️ Poster Template (ZIP) – Academic poster layout template.
🎓 Ipe Tutorial Slides (PDF) – Introductory tutorial slides by Soeren Terziadis.
🌐 Eindhoven Ipe Tricks – Collection of tips and tricks by the AGA group (TU Eindhoven).

🧩 Recommended Ipelets (Plugins)

Ipelets are Lua/C++ extensions that add powerful capabilities to Ipe. Install them by placing the .lua file in your local Ipelet directory (Help $\rightarrow$ Show configuration).

Presentation Ipelet – Creates Beamer-style boxes and presentation structures.
Decorator Ipelet – Provides decorative boxes and card containers for posters.
Pagenumbers Ipelet – Custom slide and page numbering.
Graph Ipelet – Drag and edit graph vertices while keeping connecting edges attached (Graph Mode: Ctrl+E).
Graph Drawing (TikZ) Ipelet – Automated graph drawing via TikZ algorithms.
Ipetools – CLI converters for SVG, PDF, and FIG to Ipe format.

🎨 Color Palettes & Utilities

🐍 Colors for Ipe (Python Script) – Script to generate Ipe .isy style sheets from ColorBrewer and iWantHue palettes.

💡 Pro-Tips & Techniques

Selection Behavior

Top-left to bottom-right: Selects an object only if its entire bounding box is inside the rectangle.
Bottom-right to top-left: Selects any object whose bounding box intersects the selection rectangle.

Top-left to bottom-right (selects blue circle)

Bottom-right to top-left (selects both)

Clipping Paths

To mask a figure or photo:

Group your objects (Ctrl+G).
Draw a rectangle (or polygon) over the grouped object.
Select both and choose Add Clipping Path from the context menu.

Angular Snap

Press F1 to place an angular origin (green star) at your cursor. When Angular Snap is enabled, drawing will snap to predefined angles relative to this origin. Rotate with F2, reset with Ctrl+F2, and hide with Ctrl+F1.

Partial Edge Drawings (PED)

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Partial Edge Drawing (PED) is a drawing style for non-planar graphs, in which edges are drawn only partially as pairs of opposing stubs on the respective end-vertices to reduce edge crossings and visual clutter.

In the research paper “Maximizing Ink in Partial Edge Drawings of 1-planar and k-plane Graphs”, we explore the maximization of ink in PED and symmetric PED drawings.

🛠️ Software & Source Code

The development version of the tool used in the experiments of the paper is open source and available on Bitbucket:

Bitbucket Repository: Partial Edge Drawing

👥 Contacts & Authors

For questions regarding the tool or the research paper, please contact:

Two-Sided Circular Layouts

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Two-Sided Circular Layouts are an algorithmic technique for enhancing circular graph drawings by finding a set of edges to be drawn as curves in the outer face of the circle, significantly reducing interior edge crossings.

This work was presented at SoCG ‘18:

Minimizing Crossings in Constrained Two-Sided Circular Graph Layouts
Fabian Klute and Martin Nöllenburg
34th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2018). DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2018.53

📊 Visual Comparison

From left to right:

Standard circular layout generated with OGDF.
Two-sided layout with crossing-free edges in the outer face ((k = 0)).
Two-sided layout with up to one crossing per edge in the outer face ((k = 1)).

💾 Code & Test Instances

📦 Download Source Code (two_sided.tar.gz)
Includes a qmake project file. The easiest way to build and run the tool is using the QtCreator IDE.
🗂️ Download Benchmark Instances (instances.tar.gz)

📄 Abstract

Circular graph layout is a popular drawing style, in which vertices are placed on a circle and edges are drawn as straight chords. Crossing minimization in circular layouts is NP-hard. One way to allow for fewer crossings in practice are two-sided layouts that draw some edges as curves in the exterior of the circle. In fact, one- and two-sided circular layouts are equivalent to one-page and two-page book drawings, i.e., graph layouts with all vertices placed on a line (the spine) and edges drawn in one or two distinct half-planes (the pages) bounded by the spine.

In this paper we study the problem of minimizing the crossings for a fixed cyclic vertex order by computing an optimal (k)-plane set of exteriorly drawn edges for (k \ge 1), extending the previously studied case (k=0). We show that this relates to finding bounded-degree maximum-weight induced subgraphs of circle graphs, which is a graph-theoretic problem of independent interest. We show NP-hardness for arbitrary (k), present an efficient algorithm for (k=1), and generalize it to an explicit XP-time algorithm for any fixed (k). For the practically interesting case (k=1) we implemented our algorithm and present experimental results that confirm its applicability.