Recently the authors [CCLMST23] introduced the notion of shortcut partition
of planar graphs and obtained several results from the partition, including a
tree cover with O(1) trees for planar metrics and an additive embedding into
small treewidth graphs. In this note, we apply the same partition to resolve
the Steiner point removal (SPR) problem in planar graphs: Given any set K of
terminals in an arbitrary edge-weighted planar graph G, we construct a minor
M of G whose vertex set is K, which preserves the shortest-path distances
between all pairs of terminals in G up to a constant factor. This resolves in
the affirmative an open problem that has been asked repeatedly in literature.Comment: Manuscript not intended for publication. The results have been
subsumed by arXiv:2308.00555 from the same author