Tool to re-map and delete a gradient

[Mark Crutch]

It's possible to quickly end up with several similar or identical gradients in an inkscape drawing, through copying and pasting, importing other documents, on-canvas editing, and so on. If I wish to reduce the number of gradients in the drawing, I have to manually re-map each element back to a "common" gradient, then vacuum defs to get rid of the now-unused gradients. This is time consuming and error prone.

I would like to suggest the following additions/modifications to Inkscape:

1) Either by default, or via an option, sort the list of gradients by their HSV values, rather than by name. This would group the gradients visually by their first stop colour (then second stop colour, etc.), making it much easier to identify when multiple identical or near-identical gradients are in present. This would also make it easier for the user to be able to find an appropriate gradient to re-use, rather than creating a new one.

2) Offer a means of deleting a gradient and re-mapping its uses to another gradient (or perhaps to a fixed colour). This would be conceptually similar to the "Replace Colour..." extension, in that it would take a "source" gradient and replace all uses of it with a speficied "target" gradient.

3) Offer a means to find and select all the elements that use a particular gradient.

The first of these would make it easier to identify duplicate gradients - or those that are similar enough that they can be reduced to one gradient. The second would make it simple to reduce the list of gradients by removing these duplicates. The third would make it easier to identify where the remaining gradients are actually used (sometimes I've had "mystery" gradients that were used on extremely small elements in the drawing, which were hard to identify visually).

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Related feature request:
Bug #170214 “merge identical patterns/gradients/markers”