Can generating a shapefile from a pgdb cause topology errors due to floating point conversion? I am running into gaps in a line layer of really small distances (order of 10^-4; CRS EPSG:2227 usft).
1 Answer
Shapefiles still store numbers using 64 bits of precision, 16-16 digits. It looks like you need 11 or 12, so you should not get errors unless you are doing computations in which case floating point errors are a remote possiblility.
If anything is ever converted into a 32-bit floating point number you would definitely lose precision.
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Great, thanks, I wanted to make sure that the gaps were real and not computational artifacts before going through with fixing them.– DLYCommented Sep 10, 2014 at 17:59
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You mean coordinates use 64 bit precision, numbers as attributes use less digits webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/… Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 18:51
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@user, correct. Numeric data is stored using dBase IV format (DBF file), which means as strings of digits. Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 19:48