Hi Scott - it's likely that the problem with Preview is the same thing as with Inkscape - it's actually mainly set up to deal with PDF format and so it can open up V9 and higher AI files sort of "for free" (but probably only if the option for "Make PDF compatible file" is enabled when saving out from Adobe Illustrator), but isn't able to make sense of AI v8 files.

Some confusion like this becomes inevitable when file formats go through some major restructuring between different versions. It would have probably been good if Adobe would have used some different file extension for the v9 type AI files since they are structured really differently than the v8 and earlier AI files...

Unfortunately it's not easy for applications other than Adobe Illustrator to make AI v9 or higher files with all the Illustrator specific information in them intact (like particularly layer information), because ever since AI v9 much of the Illustrator data is in a big chunk of additional private undocumented data nested inside the PDF structure.

It's only the AI v8 format which was actually documented by Adobe. So because of this it's not unusual for other programs that want to do 2D vectors transfer to primarily deal with AI v8 data when it comes to .ai format.

At any rate, since both Inkscape and Preview are really built to consume only PDF type data (either in regular PDF format or in AI v9 format with "Make PDF compatible file" enabled when saving from Illustrator) you will need to use PDF format out from MoI to make them understand the files rather than using AI v8 format.

Can you make an example file that exhibits the PDF clipping problem? If you can post an example of that I might be able to figure out what's going on there.

- Michael