I've been working with Illustrator as a student up until a few months ago. Now that I no longer have access to a free edition of Illustrator through school, I'm switching to Inkscape. I'm having trouble importing my files saved in .ai and .svg formats though. I can open them in Inkscape, but all of the images end up "flattened". I can't edit or move the objects individually, but only the image as a whole. Is this not possible to keep the objects separated when switching between Illustrator and Inkscape? Does information associated with the individual objects or layers get lost in translation? I figure that its got to be stored somewhere in the file as those .ai and .svg files remain editable in Illustrator between machines. Can Inkscape just not read those data? Is there something I'm missing? I'm sure this question has come up before, but I couldn't find an satisfactory answer when searching this forum and the internet at large. I apologize if my question is a repeat and would ask that you point me to the right link or thread. Thanks for the help!

Without access to one of those files, I can't be sure. But I would guess everything has been grouped. Select the image (after you open it in Inkscape) and click Ungroup.

Let us know if that works. And if not, providing one of the "flattened" files might help us figure it out

Yep! That seemed to be the problem. I'm glad it was so simple. Thanks for the help!