  Stress, edge crossings, and crossing angles play an important role in the
quality and readability of graph drawings. Most standard graph drawing
algorithms optimize one of these criteria which may lead to layouts that are
deficient in other criteria. We introduce an optimization framework,
Stress-Plus-X (SPX), that simultaneously optimizes stress together with several
other criteria: edge crossings, minimum crossing angle, and upwardness (for
directed acyclic graphs). SPX achieves results that are close to the
state-of-the-art algorithms that optimize these metrics individually. SPX is
flexible and extensible and can optimize a subset or all of these criteria
simultaneously. Our experimental analysis shows that our joint optimization
approach is successful in drawing graphs with good performance across
readability criteria.
