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I am trying to reduce the number of nodes in a shapefile because I want to extract the X and Y coordinates for use in R. As the number of nodes approaches hundreds of thousands, it does not work well with what I am doing.

Is there any way to do this with QGIS?

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  • Welcome to GIS SE. As a new user, please take the Tour. FYI: Generally the points at the ends of line segments are referred to as "nodes". Interior points are generally just considered "vertices." You're looking to "generalize" or "simplify" your geometries. Be careful when generalizing polygons, because you may cause slivers of overlap or gaps between neighboring geometries.
    – Vince
    Commented Nov 15, 2017 at 3:38

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You can use Simplify Geometries under Vector ==> Geometry Tools. Depending on what value you select for your Simplify tolerance and what type of data is in your shapefile, the operation may render your data undesirable for farther analysis. See the effect of the operation in the images below.

Before simplifying

Before simplifying

After simplifying

After simplifying

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