Hello all,

I'm a new inkscape user with what may be a dumb question, but I haven't yet found an answer through web searches or the mailing list archives.

What I want to do is add a gradient to an object which is neither a single linear or elliptical gradient. (In particular, I'm trying to achieve faux-3D bubble effects for web graphics.)

I can imagine two likely ways to do it:

1 - Apply multiple linear gradients to the same object and manually adjust their axes to achieve the desired effect.

2 - Apply a gradient that is defined by the orthogonal distance from the edge of an object rather than the distance from some fixed point.

But, I can't seem to find any way of doing either in inkscape. Am I missing something? Does such functionality simply not exist (yet)?

In case it's useful to the next person searching for help on this, here's my workaround:

For object that can be decomposed into a small number of linear sides and involved a flat foreground and background color, I've been mimicking option #2 above as follows. I create an object with solid fill and then overlay it with thin rectangles aligned along each edge. Each rectangle is then given a gradient from background color to transparent. It works well for something simple (like a rectangle), but becomes prohibitively complicated for complex objects.

Finally, I want to offer thanks to the developers. I'm very impressed by Inkscape. Haven't come across another piece of software that so perfectly strikes a balance between an intuitive, natural interface and access to a rich feature set. (It more than makes up for the list of pesky gnome libs I had to install in order to get the thing up and running.) Nicely done!

- Erik