  Computing planar orthogonal drawings with the minimum number of bends is one
of the most relevant topics in Graph Drawing. The problem is known to be
NP-hard, even when we want to test the existence of a rectilinear planar
drawing, i.e., an orthogonal drawing without bends (Garg and Tamassia, 2001).
From the parameterized complexity perspective, the problem is fixed-parameter
tractable when parameterized by the sum of three parameters: the number of
bends, the number of vertices of degree at most two, and the treewidth of the
input graph (Di Giacomo et al., 2022). We improve this last result by showing
that the problem remains fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized only by
the number of vertices of degree at most two plus the number of bends. As a
consequence, rectilinear planarity testing lies in \FPT~parameterized by the
number of vertices of degree at most two.
