Hi!
I recently worked on a piece that made the gradient branding problem that plagues not only Inkscape painfully ... visible.
A Launchpad bug about this dates back to 2008; here's a new one by yours truly, with example: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/154
On this list, I'd like to describe a workaround and ask if anyone can think of an improvement (on Linux, no proprietary software).
I tried Inkscape, Imagemagick's convert (internal or using rsvg-convert), rsvg-convert directly, resvg's rendersvg. Also Firefox and a random Webkit-browser. Banding in all cases. convert allows 16 bit per channel (or more), but it made no difference to the result (I suspect the delegates never actually delivered 16 bits).
In contrast, Chromium renders gradients in a way that appears perfectly smooth here (to my eyes, on this display). On close inspection, there's dithering at work.
A way to get the rendering out of Chromium, without even worse acrobatics like taking a screenshot or printing to a file: Use a "wrapper.html" containing something like this: "<img src="in.svg">" Chromium then offers "Copy image" on right-click. The result can be pasted from the clipboard.
With xclip, directly to a file: xclip -selection clipboard -target image/png -out > out.png
Or in GIMP: using "Paste as" -> "New Image" (Ctrl-Shift-V).
Is anyone here aware of other (libre) software that delivers results as good or better than Chromium?
Maybe someone knows enough about using Chromium headless to tell me how I could automate the process?