  In a balloon drawing of a tree, all the children under the same parent are
placed on the circumference of the circle centered at their parent, and the
radius of the circle centered at each node along any path from the root
reflects the number of descendants associated with the node. Among various
styles of tree drawings reported in the literature, the balloon drawing enjoys
a desirable feature of displaying tree structures in a rather balanced fashion.
For each internal node in a balloon drawing, the ray from the node to each of
its children divides the wedge accommodating the subtree rooted at the child
into two sub-wedges. Depending on whether the two sub-wedge angles are required
to be identical or not, a balloon drawing can further be divided into two
types: even sub-wedge and uneven sub-wedge types. In the most general case, for
any internal node in the tree there are two dimensions of freedom that affect
the quality of a balloon drawing: (1) altering the order in which the children
of the node appear in the drawing, and (2) for the subtree rooted at each child
of the node, flipping the two sub-wedges of the subtree. In this paper, we give
a comprehensive complexity analysis for optimizing balloon drawings of rooted
trees with respect to angular resolution, aspect ratio and standard deviation
of angles under various drawing cases depending on whether the tree is of even
or uneven sub-wedge type and whether (1) and (2) above are allowed. It turns
out that some are NP-complete while others can be solved in polynomial time. We
also derive approximation algorithms for those that are intractable in general.
