The graphic below illustrates the result of intersecting two polygon feature classes with the Output Type parameter set to LINE. The output polygon features are where a polygon from one of the input feature classes or layer intersects a polygon from the other input feature class or layer. The graphic below illustrates the result of intersecting two polygon feature classes with the Output Type parameter set to either POLY or the default (LOWEST). Touch at a point-This type of intersection can be produced by specifying POINT as the Output Type.Common boundary/touch at a line-This type of intersection can be produced by specifying LINE as the Output Type.Overlap-Area of overlap can be produced by leaving the Output Type to its default value (LOWEST).This can be useful to discover polygon overlap and line intersections (as points or lines). In this case, instead of discovering intersections between the features from the different feature classes or layers, it will discover the intersections between features within the single input. These are not a different representation of the same intersections they are intersections that can only be represented by that geometry type (point, line, or polygon). Specifying different output type will produce different types of intersections of the input feature classes.
The output geometry type can only be of the same geometry or a geometry of lower dimension as the input feature class with the lowest dimension geometry (point = 0 dimension, line = 1 dimension, and poly = 2 dimension). The inputs can be any combination of geometry types (point, multipoint, line, or polygon). To explicitly control the output spatial reference (coordinate system and domains), set the appropriate environments, the Output Z Aware and Output M Aware. When multiple feature classes or layers are specified in the list of input features, the order of the entries in the list does not affect the output feature type, but the spatial reference of the top entry on the tool dialog box (the first entry in scripting) in the list will be used during processing and set to the output.