Ortho's line segment routing algorithm

I am curious about the orthogonal line segment routing algorithm used by graphviz. I read some papers, and it feels inferior to graphviz’s ortho in terms of space usage and effect.
In particular, graphviz’s ortho does a particularly good job of avoiding overlap at terminal nodes and passing “alleys”, and some papers I’ve seen don’t do enough to avoid overlap. So about the line segment routing algorithm of graphviz’s ortho, are there any references? Thanks in advance.