This thesis makes a contribution to the field of Graph Drawing, with a focus on the planarity drawing convention. The following three problems are considered.

(1) Ordered Level Planarity:

We introduce and study the problem Ordered Level Planarity which asks for a planar drawing of a graph such that vertices are placed at prescribed positions in the plane and such that every edge is realized as a y-monotone curve. This can be interpreted as a variant of Level Planarity in which the vertices on each level appear in a prescribed total order. We establish a complexity dichotomy with respect to both the maximum degree and the level-width, that is, the maximum number of vertices that share a level. Our study of Ordered Level Planarity is motivated by connections to several other graph drawing problems. With reductions from Ordered Level Planarity, we show NP-hardness of multiple problems whose complexity was previously open, and strengthen several previous hardness results. In particular, our reduction to Clustered Level Planarity generates instances with only two nontrivial clusters. This answers a question posed by Angelini, Da Lozzo, Di Battista, Frati, and Roselli [2015]. We settle the complexity of the Bi-Monotonicity problem, which was proposed by Fulek, Pelsmajer, Schaefer, and Stefankovic [2013]. We also present a reduction to Manhattan Geodesic Planarity, showing that a previously [2009] claimed polynomial time algorithm is incorrect unless P=NP.

(2) Two-page book embeddings of triconnected planar graphs:

We show that every triconnected planar graph of maximum degree five is a subgraph of a Hamiltonian planar graph or, equivalently, it admits a two-page book embedding. In fact, our result is more general: we only require vertices of separating 3-cycles to have degree at most five, all other vertices may have arbitrary degree. This degree bound is tight: we describe a family of triconnected planar graphs that cannot be realized on two pages and where every vertex of a separating 3-cycle has degree at most six. Our results strengthen earlier work by Heath [1995] and by Bauernöppel [1987] and, independently, Bekos, Gronemann, and Raftopoulou [2016], who showed that planar graphs of maximum degree three and four, respectively, can always be realized on two pages. The proof is constructive and yields a quadratic time algorithm to realize the given graph on two pages.

(3) Convexity-increasing morphs:

We study the problem of convexifying drawings of planar graphs. Given any planar straight-line drawing of an internally 3-connected graph, we show how to morph the drawing to one with strictly convex faces while maintaining planarity at all times. Our morph is convexity-increasing, meaning that once an angle is convex, it remains convex. We give an efficient algorithm that constructs such a morph as a composition of a linear number of steps where each step either moves vertices along horizontal lines or moves vertices along vertical lines. Moreover, we show that a linear number of steps is worst-case optimal.