Hello,
I found an old article about problems with Shapefiles/ArcView and would like to know if the problem also exists after ArcView, in arcMap and ArcGIs Pro? Or was it a specific problem with ArcView and shapefiles?
Automatic translation from http://www.wlm.at/Arc4You/A4clean/Poly%20Error.htm
Due to the inaccuracies of floating point numbers, there must be a tolerance level below which points, line or polygon sections are recognized as identical and also removed during cleanup. This is the so-called fuzzy tolerance. At first glance, ArcMap lacks such a metric. In reality, it is applied internally whenever a line or polygon is processed. Only this accuracy cannot be set, but is calculated variably by ArcView as about 10-6 to 10-12 of the extent of the shape in X and Y direction. Thus, countless different tolerance limits are applied in a shapefile. Fine structures between neighboring surfaces are removed in the larger polygon, but remain in the smaller one. This results in tiny overlaps or gaps. This occurs very often when polygons are split into halves of different sizes. Since ArcView removes all vertices whose distance to each other is below the tolerance limit, single vertices on "straight" sections are often missing. The outlines of two adjacent polygons are then only apparently identical.
The resulting tiny gaps and overlaps are usually not visible and cannot be detected by "normal" means in ArcView, since any comparison or intersection between polygons is subject to the internal blur tolerance. However, as the polygons are further cut or reduced in size, the blur tolerance also becomes finer, and overlaps or gaps that were not previously "present" may appear in places that were not processed at all. We refer to these errors as fuzzy vertices, which cause hidden overlaps and gaps.
