i am designing some business  cards for myself, and i used the gradient tool to make my logo name fade. so when i saved it as a PDF file. when i open the PDF everything looks right except the gradient in the letters is gone. it wont save with the fade that i want. is there a trick to get this to save as a PDF file so can print my cards out with the fade using the gradient tool? any help is appreciated. ???

Welcome decaljunky!
As far as I understand, gradients now should remain intact after the PDF conversion. What version of Inkscape are you using? Because it's only relatively recently this happened.

Also, I don't know why this helps, but in my experience, it's necessary to save as SVG first, then Save as PDF. Easy and worth a try?