Speaking of gradients, just in case you need a bezier mesh math refresher mish mash (so to speak), I wrote one here: http://laxkit.sourceforge.net/html/lotsamath.html

I made an svg approximation generator for bezier meshes, loosely based on Bulia's method, which works sort of ok in most cases. Bezier meshes can be made to be conical gradients, but the svg blur technique doesn't do so well for that configuration. Pdf, by the way, natively supports bezier patches, so if such things get in Inkscape, they can at least export naturally to pdf.

Compare svg approximation versus actual patch: http://laidout.org/other/exported-svg.png http://laidout.org/other/exported-laidoutpatch.png

-Tom

Jasper van de Gronde wrote:

...

.... but I started a Wiki page on how we could approximate more advanced gradients... http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Advanced_Gradients