Thanks for new idea
Especially it is may be useful for Page Background and Cell Backround in table.

Workaround: create picture with needed gradient and use it.

PS: what ODF standard tells about it?

I agree, this is a good and interesting feature.

This monster bug has to be split up to tasks which are realistic to implement. As a start, master now supports gradients as textframe backgrounds:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=d884f8f65cc73cf932cde1e40cadf13556a7d44e

Regarding ODF, gradient backgrounds were already part of the standard, just Writer textframes didn't support it.

I'm closing this bug, but feel free to open a separate bugs for other related features (one that comes to my mind is table/row/cell gradient background, that probably would make sense).

Thanks for implementing this functionality

Oh, forgot to say: OOXML filters are also updated, DOC/RTF is not done yet. I plan to do the RTF part, but some rework is needed there first: right now we export old-style Word frames in the RTF filter, and gradients are only supported in new-style Word frames.

With commit d3f7925ccc962eb9adc31fb2174fa18de4b31c0a, RTF filters are also updated.

@Miklos: Thank you very much for implementing this feature!