Textured straight-line node-link diagrams

Dense node-link diagrams can be hard to read because overlapping edges and frequent crossings make it difficult to distinguish edges and follow connections. Existing layout-preserving approaches can help disambiguate crossings or distinguish nearby edges, but they do not necessarily provide a persistent visual identity for following an edge over long distances. Our work on Modulo-Aligned Weaving (MAW) adds woven textures at crossing points, thereby clarifying crossings without altering the graph layout. To address the need for persistent edge identity, we introduce Textured Edges, a method that gives each edge a distinct procedural texture along its full length, not just at crossings. This provides a persistent identity cue intended to support long-distance tracing while preserving the original graph layout. We describe how Textured Edges works, including how parameters are set, how textures are created, and how they are mapped onto edges. We then compare Textured Edges and MAW in an exploratory user study using synthetic graph stimuli, focusing on tasks such as edge tracing, crossing interpretation, and disambiguating dense regions. High observed accuracy was recorded under both visualization conditions on many objective tasks. More participants selected Textured Edges for long-distance tracing, while MAW received somewhat more selections in some confidence-based and many-crossing judgments. The response patterns from the study suggest potential task-dependent differences between the two methods, but the exploratory statistical tests do not show statistically significant differences in the examined comparisons or demonstrate that one technique is superior to the other.