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On collinear sets in straight line drawings

We consider straight line drawings of a planar graph $G$ with possible edge crossings. The \emph{untangling problem} is to eliminate all edge crossings by moving as few vertices as possible to new positions. Let $fix(G)$ denote the maximum number of vertices that can be left fixed in the worst case. In the \emph{allocation problem}, we are given a planar graph $G$ on $n$ vertices together with an $n$-point set $X$ in the plane and have to draw $G$ without edge crossings so that as many vertices as possible are located in $X$. Let $fit(G)$ denote the maximum number of points fitting this purpose in the worst case. As $fix(G)\le fit(G)$, we are interested in upper bounds for the latter and lower bounds for the former parameter. For each $ε>0$, we construct an infinite sequence of graphs with $fit(G)=O(n^{σ+ε})$, where $σ<0.99$ is a known graph-theoretic constant, namely the shortness exponent for the class of cubic polyhedral graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of graphs with $fit(G)=o(n)$. On the other hand, we prove that $fix(G)\ge\sqrt{n/30}$ for all $G$ with tree-width at most 2. This extends the lower bound obtained by Goaoc et al. [Discrete and Computational Geometry 42:542-569 (2009)] for outerplanar graphs. Our upper bound for $fit(G)$ is based on the fact that the constructed graphs can have only few collinear vertices in any crossing-free drawing. To prove the lower bound for $fix(G)$, we show that graphs of tree-width 2 admit drawings that have large sets of collinear vertices with some additional special properties.