You can make a material for screen to work in both hidden line and rendering. For hidden line assign a small grid fill to a 100% transparent material. For rendering make an alpha mask of the same grid fill by taking a screen shot and editing in Photoshop to delete all the white space; then use this as the texture for the material in rendering.
Keep in mind that you probably can't make the mesh as fine as it really is (at least for insect screen) since the line weights/pixels will fill in solid.
I have a material like this around somewhere. I'll post it If I can find it.
