In Inkscape 0.46 the perspective effect doesn’t work as expected. I don’t know why, but the gradients are not transformed with the paths, so I have to readjust the gradients after applying the perspective effect. This is very frustrating when working with complex artwork. I checked it on Windows XP and Ubuntu Hardy as well, the result was the same, the gradient stays at its original location. I have the transform gradients option checked in Inkscape preferences. Any suggestions how to do perspective on paths with gradients properly?

A gradient can't be distorted because it's represented by a single line (a envelope distort on a line will result in a line--perhaps shorter or longer). But you've said that you can manually adjust the gradient to get what you want, so what sort of adjustments are you doing that you think envelope distort should do for you?

Note that it doesn't surprise me that envelop distortion doesn't currently effect the fill--I imagine it could be extremely tricky to distort a pattern fill.

When I apply the perspective effect the selected paths are moved and resized into the frame of the envelope, while the related gradients stay intact. So I have to move all the gradients to the new position, resize and rotate them depending on the form of the envelope (e.g. if I had a rectangle with a linear gradient reaching from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, then I have to readjust the gradient to match the new corners after the perspective effect). What surprised me is that for others it seems to work, see this screencast: http://screencasters.heathenx.org/episode-037

I think I understand your issue. One of the things I have to point out is when I made that screencast I was using version 0.45. Version 0.46 has different behavior. Regardless if I have the move gradients option selected, after I apply the perspective effect I lose my gradient position as well. So basically I'm in the same boat. I have to move the gradient stops back onto the object. Either this is a minor bug or intended functionality with a rather hidden setting somewhere. I'm using Ubuntu 9.04.

My current SVN version of Inkscape (r21449, soon to be 0.47) does not exhibit this behavior. It works just like the screencast. I'm a little confused about this. I'm back to wondering if this is a bug in 0.46 or a feature setting. Hmm...

Well, things are getting quite interesting. I checked out revision 21449 from SVN, compiled and installed it. So basically we are on the very same version of Inkscape now. However I still experience the same behaviour, the gradients do not move with perspective. Maybe the problem lies in one of the dependencies and not in Inkscape source code. I'm using Ubuntu 8.04.