SVG supports both clipping and filters. Some other formats do as well, for instance, EMF+, (although the supported filters do not match very well between SVG and EMF+).
I can see how one would convert those features from other graphics formats to SVG during import (more or less).
However, for output to another file type I do not see where either the clipping or filters would be passed, perhaps buried in style?
I thought that maybe the clipping was applied upstream somehow, so that the driver level would just draw what was left, but could not test the idea because it seems that clipping has some problems in Trunk right now.
For instance, I found this SVG example on the web:
http://svg-whiz.com/svg/clipRect.svg
and while it loaded into Inkscape (linux or Windows) without throwing a warning or error, and the contents show up in the XML editor, nothing is visible on the screen. That example works in 0.48.4, but not r12721.
Thanks,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech