I'm trying to fade a diagram containing a block of text, so that the left is invisible and the right looks normal. The §23.4.3 of the TikZ manual contains an example that looks like it should do exactly what I want (other than it fades in a different direction, which I'm sure is trivial thing to change). Adding a prologue to make a full MWE, their example is as follows:
\documentclass[10pt]{article} \usepackage{tikz} \begin{document} \usetikzlibrary {fadings} \tikz \node [scope fading=south,fading angle=45,text width=3.5cm] { This is some text that will fade out as we go right and down. It is pretty hard to achieve this effect in other ways. }; \end{document} Unfortunately, the code produces a PDF that doesn't render properly on 3 out of the 4 PDF viewers I regularly use. (The one that does work, bizarrely, is the built-in viewer in Firefox, which is normally one of the worst. I usually find that evince, the Gnome PDF viewer, is best, but it fails here.) Aside from the difficulty working on a document that doesn't render properly with my usual tools, I'm concerned that it will not render properly when I send the finished book to the publisher to be printed.
Is there a better, more robust way of doing this? An overlaid box with an alpha channel that varies from opaque white on the left to fully transparent on the right would seem the logical approach, but I don't know how to do alpha channel transparency in LaTeX and the word 'alpha' doesn't appear in the documentation of the xcolor package.
I'm using XeLaTeX if that's relevant. The real example is more complicated and makes use of other TikZ features, so I do really need to stick with TikZ or something on top of that.
