.ai file opens but text is tough to edit and various lines seem to be grouped in some way
does Inkscape open .ai text Ok? have I done something wrong? need to change some setting?
thank you

Text in Inkscape is a little wonky in so far as bringing in text from other vector apps is concerned. I think the problem currently has more to do with the text handling parts of the SVG spec its self than with a shortcoming of Inkscape.

There's a few annual gatherings of stakeholders (including Inkscape, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Qt etc) that try and work on the standard to get this right. Adobe, being Adobe can do whatever it wants on its own and so the solution for text handling they use in AI has no needs for standardization with the SVG spec.

As you probably have seen, when you open an .ai file with a text editor you get a wall of unreadable garbage text. It's essentially encoded into a proprietary format. OTOH, .svg is valid, human readable and editable XML and so Inkscape, using SVG must translate from what is essentially Adobe Postscript (proprietary) language to valid XML. This becomes challenging when you take into account things like how text aligns, leads, kerns, spacing, fills, along, over or under paths and such you can see how it becomes a bit of a Pandora's box.

Here's a handy link to an overview of where things stand with SVG and text handling
http://tavmjong.free.fr/SVG/TEXT_SYDNEY_2016/

The author is the main "delegate" from Inkscape to the W3 consortium's SVG Working Group. I hope it helps and sorry for the history lesson and what I'll bet is a less than satisfying conclusion for your purposes. The upside is, that even Adobe is in on the dev of this standard and when they eventually and inevitably nail this, programs like Illustrator will likely conform to it. That will signal an opening up of a whole new world of opportunities for FOSS design! Cheers.

Hello,
I agree with previous post.
Don't expect a %100 accuracy when importing files from other programs.
Now about imported text, It's true that strange things happens when importing text, from not found font letters, to bad aligning and strange grouping of text.

If You could share a sample file The problems can be described better.

But there aren't easy solutions. Try to copy and paste the text in a text editor. Then, I think It's better to re-create the text in Inkscape.

There's also the option to 'import via poppler' in the import dialog. You could try if that makes a difference. It appears to often solve text-related import problems (but not always).