questions for new cnc user

Hello,

I'm a new cnc user, and I have a couple of questions. I have a
sherline 5500 milling machine. I'm using some powermax II stepper
motors with gecko 201 (just 201, not the 'a' version) drives. The
g201's are connected via parallel port to a dos machine. For
software I'm using cncpro.

1) My steppers are 1.8 degree/step, the sherline is 20 revolutions
per inch, and the gecko is a 10-microstep driver, so I compute
40,000 steps per inch. However, when I command the software to move
1 inch, it only moves (approx) 0.75". Where did I go wrong?

2) I've tried using some software (DeskEngrave) to engrave TTF
fonts. I'm using a 3/16" end mill. The problem I'm having is that
the end mills are centered on the edges of the font characters,
resulting in really fat characters. I would rather have the end
mills moving inside the character, with the edge of the end mill
matching the edge of the character. (I hope this makes sense). Is
there a common way to do this? Is there better (freeware/shareware)
software for engraving text?

3) Does anyone have a good g-code test pattern?

Thanks,
Scott