I am trying to create scanlines with tiled clones with a diagonal scanlines. I use p1:simple translation with one row and 20 columns, but no matter how I change the rows the lines are always to far spread out. Is there another setting that I need to touch in order to control how far the lines are spread out.

The gap is because your lines are on an angle so they have a larger bounding area. There are two ways around this.

The first is to "Shift" the clones position. Go to the Shift tab of the "Create Tiled Clones" windows and put in a negative percentage for Shift X /per column.

The other way is to work with horizontal or vertical lines to begin with, clone, then rotate. And you can control the gap between lines grouping the original line with another object to make the bounding area a bit larger. Then once you've cloned it, delete the extra object from the original.

I was knew it would be easy, but seemed like everything I touched made the pattern go worse. Thanks for the advice.

An other way to make easy Scanlines:
Use a alternate Gradient from 80% alpha gray to 0% alpha white.

Greetz,
Coco

Good tip - although be aware that if you create a sharp transition from one colour to the next you'll get pixelation. Inkscape doesn't apply AA to gradients so you need to create some separation between stops to compensate.

@ Coco

Use a alternate Gradient from 80% alpha gray to 0% alpha white.

How did you do that?

Use the CMYK Register:
Or set Alhpa grey under RGB / HSL to 204.

Also, select the "Repeat" option on the Fill dialog to "reflect".

Right. Try out this kind of Gradients with another Object overlap. Not scanlines but interesting Effects ! Cool !
see picture:
http://pixel-pics.de/picture/show/583

The overlapping radial gradients are particularly neat.

Did not realize you could do this with gradients thanks for the tip