I do a lot of engraving as a side aspect of my job. The fills used by most engraver software are contour gradients; a feature like this combined with the ability to read in a list from a formatted text file would make Inkscape an *amazing* replacement for my current engraving software, which can only handle very basic things. The Inset and Outset feature seems to almost do this, but not quite, as it doesn't actually fill the shape, as far as I can tell. Are there any plans to add these features to Inkscape?
I don't know if contour gradients are supported directly anywhere, but AFAIK in other vector apps they are usually emulated by blends. You do one inset/outset of the shape and then blend it with the original. We don't support blends yet, but if someone is motivated enough, s/he could port the algorithm from e.g. Skencil which has blends.