A general method for drawing area-proportional Euler diagrams

Area-proportional Euler diagrams have many applications, for example they are often used for visualizing data in medical and biological domains. There have been a number of recent research efforts to automatically draw Euler diagrams when the areas of the regions are not considered, leading to a range of different drawing techniques. By contrast, substantially less progress has been made on the problem of automatically drawing area-proportional Euler diagrams, although some partial results have been derived. In this paper, we considerably advance the state-of-the-art in area-proportional Euler diagram drawing by presenting the first method that is capable of generating such a diagram given any area-proportional specification. Moreover, our drawing method is sufficiently flexible that it allows one to specify which of the typically enforced well-formedness conditions should be possessed by the to-be-drawn Euler diagram.

► The first method that is always capable of drawing an area-proportional Euler diagram. ► The method is flexible: certain properties that the Euler diagram is to possess can be chosen. ► The approach is inductive, identifying suitable curve routes to achieve the required areas.