I am trying to help a friend with his home-brew CNC router. A job he has been asked to do involves carving test into a board. To do this he needs his test characters to be outlines filled with cutting lines at the spacing he determines by the size of the text and the size of the milling bit he needs to use. This is beyond my skill level in Inkscape - is it possible?

Yes, take a look at the gcodetools extension, area filling (for zigzag and spiral fills). First you need to set the tool parameters, then you can do the hatching with the area part. (extension included in Inkscape 0.91), some info available here: https://www.norwegiancreations.com/2015 ... -inkscape/ and there are lots of videos for it, too.

If you prefer hatch/crosshatch, you can use one of the eggbot extensions to do the hatching for you, see https://github.com/evil-mad/EggBot/tree ... ape_driver .