First of all thanks for such a great product.
I know that full control can be achieved by directly editing the file, but I don't know how much Inkscape might still change. After looking though the files produced by Inkscape, I know that for each item that uses a gradient, a special 'dummy' gradient is created that uses the 'real' gradient. This makes it where each item can have it's own transforms for the gradient. But, what if I want two items to use the same transforms, the same 'dummy' gradient. I could use a clone, but what if I have an ellipse and a rectangle, but both I want to use the same gradient.
Here is how it currently works:
linearGradient1234 (real gradient with real stops) | |- linearGradient2345 (dummy gradient uses 1234) | | | |- rectangle (using dummy gradient 2345) | |- linearGradient7890 (dummy gradient uses 1234) | |- ellipse (using dummy gradient 7890)
What I want to be able to do is this:
linearGradient1234 (real gradient with real stops) | |- linearGradient2345 (dummy gradient uses 1234) | |- rectangle (using dummy gradient 2345) |- ellipse (using dummy gradient 2345)
So that any transforms I apply to the gradient used by the rectangle will also affect the ellipse.
Perhaps something that would be nice would be a 'graph' editor for gradients (and for other things maybe as well) that would show the 'real' gradient, and any 'dummy' child gradients connected, grandchild gradients,etc, or something where you can define the actual relationship however you want. Then, when assigning a gradient you can select from not a gradient list only showing the 'real' but a tree, where the items in the root of the tree are the top gradients and sub-items are child gradients that use the top gradients or their parent gradients (support for any level of nested gradients, grandchild gradients, etc)
When editing a gradient for an item, the ability to 'pick' which gradient is being edited would be nice as well. For example. If my document is like this:
linearGradient1234 (real gradient with real stops) | |- linearGradient2345 (dummy gradient uses 1234) | |- rectangle (using dummy gradient 2345) | |- linearGradient7890 (dummy gradient uses 2345 which uses 1234) |- ellipse (using dummy gradient 7890)
When editing the gradient of the ellipse, I can choose to edit gradient 7890 which would only affect the ellipse, or I can edit 2345, which would affect both the ellipse and the rectangle, or I can edit the stops of 1234, which would affect both. This would also make it easy to have a master transformation in 2345 that affects both and a fine-tuned transformation in 7890 just for the ellipse.
Perhaps even the same idea could be applied to anything, such as patterns as well.
Brian Vanderburg II