A rectilinear polygon is a polygon whose edges are axis-aligned. Walking counterclockwise on the boundary of such a polygon yields a sequence of left turns and right turns. The number of left turns always equals the number of right turns plus 4. It is known that any such sequence can be realized by a rectilinear polygon. In this paper, we consider the problem of finding realizations that minimize the perimeter or the area of the polygon or the area of the bounding box of the polygon. We show that all three problems are NP-hard in general. This answers an open question of Patrignani [CGTA 2001], who showed that it is NP-hard to minimize the area of the bounding box of an orthogonal drawing of a given planar graph. We also show that realizing polylines with minimum bounding box area is NP-hard. Then we consider the special cases of $x$-monotone and $xy$-monotone rectilinear polygons. For these, we can optimize the three objectives efficiently.
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