It is proved that any plane graph may be represented by a triangle contact system, that is a collection of triangular disks which are disjoint except at contact points, each contact point being a node of exactly one triangle. Representations using contacts of T- of Y-shaped objects follow. Moreover, there is a one-to-one mapping between all the triangular contact representations of a maximal plane graph and all its partitions into three Schnyder trees.

Regular orientations, that is orientations such that almost all the vertices have the same indegree, relates many combinatorial and topological properties, such as arboricity, page number, and planarity. These orientations are a basic tool in solving combinatorial problems that preserve topological properties. Planar augmentations are a simple example of such problems.

We give an O(|V(G)|)-time algorithm to assign vertical and horizontal segments to the vertices of any bipartite plane graph G so that (i) no two segments have an interior point in common, (ii) two segments touch each other if and only if the corresponding vertices are adjacent. As a corollary, we obtain a strengthening of the following theorem of Ringel and Petrovic. The edges of any maximal bipartite plane graph G with outer face bwb'w' can be colored by two colors such that the color classes form spanning trees of G-b and G-b', respectively. Furthermore, such a coloring can be found in linear time. Our method is based on a new linear-time algorithm for constructing bipolar orientations of 2-connected plane graphs.

We are concerned with two classes of planar graphs: maximal planar graphs (i.e. polyhedral graphs, triangulations) and maximal bipartite planar graphs (i.e. bipartite planar graphs with quadrilateral faces). For these graphs we consider constrained orientations with a constant indegree for the internal vertex set. We recall or prove new fundamental relations between these orientations, specific tree decompositions and bipolar orientations. In particular, these relations yield linear time computation algorithms. Using these orientations, we give a characterization of 4-connected maximal planar graphs and 3-connected planar graphs, which leads to simple line time algorithms.

We present a simple linear time algorithm finding a Kuratowski subdivision in a DFS cotree critical graphs, based on recent theoretical results. For sake of clarity, we shall outline the proofs of the Theorem we make use of. This algorithm is the last part of the two step linear time Kuratowski finding algorithm implemented in PIGALE (``Public Implementation of a Graph Algorithm Library and Editor'', freely available at http://pigale.sourceforge.org).

We give a characterization of DFS-cotree critical graphs which is central to the linear time Kuratowski finding algorithm implemented in PIGALE

We give a characterization of DFS cotree-critical graphs which is central to the linear time Kuratowski finding algorithm implemented in PIGALE (Public Implementation of a Graph Algorithm Library and Editor) by the authors, and deduce an algorithm for finding a Kuratowski subdivision in a DFS cotree-critical graph.