Drawing maps on oriented surfaces

Abstract

In this article we describe a program -- called planar_draw -- to draw maps on oriented surfaces in the plane. The drawings are coded as tikz files that can easily be manipulated and used in latex documents. Next to plane maps -- a case for which already several programs exist -- the program allows to draw maps of genus at least one inside a fundamental polygon or with non-contractible cycles displayed as disjoint cycles that have to be identified. Several options allow to tailor the output for individual needs -- e.g.\ by forcing some edges to be completely inside the fundamental polygon. In combination with a program embedding graphs, the tool can also be used for graphs that do not already come with an embedding in an orientable surface.