[Publisher] How to manipulate gradient on paragraph style decoration ?

[Hadriscus]

Hi everybody,

I've learned a lot recently about publishing, and although there is plenty I don't know yet, I feel like my layout is becoming more and more orthodox, so to say. It all flows nicely, pictures and text hand in hand, I made pretty styles for my chapter headings, and the few hiccups I've encountered so far have been solved by you guys, of this I am very thankful.

Here I am trying to change a paragraph style's decoration settings to "gradient" and place the gradient where I want, just as I would do with a gradient on a regular shape, such as a rectangle. It works with the default linear gradient, but I'd like something fancier and change it to an elliptical gradient. However the buttons in the color popover only allow for changing gradient stops and color/opacity settings, but not the actual origin and direction of the gradient... I've tried using the fill tool, but it only seems to operate on the actual text, rather than the text style decoration, no matter which mode I set in the tool settings above.

This is not a vital matter at all, but I would appreciate any help. I feel like I'm overlooking something.

Cheers,

Hadrien

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Here's the heading in question. The decoration is a fill that takes up the entire column width, with a linear gradient going from brown to blue (I didn't find how to change interpolation between gradient stops, so I just added two of them very close together). What I'd like to do is have the brown/blue separation be somewhat curvy, hence the elliptical gradient.

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[Hadriscus]

Thanks for the tip @Lagarto ! I didn't think of using several decorations to achieve this. Unfortunately there are no blending modes as with layers, so the circle is not being clipped by the other rectangular blue style... do you know if by any chance there's a way to use an actual image as decoration for a paragraph style ?

[Hadriscus]

Here is what I used to have :

It is all hand painted and has a little wiggliness to it. There's a "drop shadow" layer effect on top as well. I liked the look of it but it didn't play nice with the text flow, since every time the text changed ever so slightly I had to reposition it below the chapter text by hand, and this defeats the purpose of using a publishing program. I wish style decorations were a little more fleshed out so I could use my own image in place of the outline and fill settings in there.

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[Hadriscus]

Ah good idea ! Thanks a bunch for the example file, much appreciated. It's better automated than my previous attempt. A custom font is a clever idea but probably too much work for this specific job, plus I don't know much about font editing/creation... -I've dabbled with FontForge but it is super glitchy (by the way if you know an alternative I'm a taker).

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