连接两个 Google 地球地标

Question

I have installed Google Earth Pro and added a couple of placemarks (yellow pins). So these placemarks can be found in the left tree view and contains of course a position (latitude, longitude).

Now, I want to connect two of them by a "line"/"track" or however you want to call it. So, such a track should connect "Pin A" with "Pin B". Or in other words: If I move "Pin A" then the point of the track should update its position as well.

I know, that there is the polygon/path function, but with this you create own positions for this path (so they are not based/connected on the pins).

Are there any solutions for this problem? I know that there are many topics with exactly this question, but they are quite old and maybe not up to date. Maybe someone knows an official plugin for Google Earth?

Answer 1

Short answer is no, there's not a way to do this in Google Earth or KML.

What you're asking for sounds like a topological connection, where one feature (the Point and its single vertex) is topologically connected to another feature (the Line, or specifically, one vertex of the Line), so that when the Point is moved, the corresponding vertex of the line is also moved. KML does not have any way to encode topology, so there's no way to "connect" the point's single vertex to a vertex of the line, and therefore there's no way to do this in Earth Pro.

The closest you can get is to combine the point and polygon into a "MultiGeometry", which allows multiple geometries to live within one "Placemark". This lets you to do things like applying one shared style to all of them, having all the connected geometries "highlight" together when the mouse hovers over one of them (see "highlight styles" in the KML docs), and to share balloon/info-window content. But the geometries and their vertices remain independently defined, with no way to link them topologically. Note that this MultiGeometry concept (and custom highlight styles, etc.) can be created when writing KML by hand or programmatically, but there's no tool to create them in the Earth Pro user interface.

Topology and topological connections are something that more advanced GIS packages can handle, so depending on what you want to accomplish, maybe look at QGIS, ArcGIS, or similar.