Xavier,
thanks for the explanation, now I know at least that it is not my fault ;-)

The big plan sounds good to me, and definitely like a big piece of work.

I also found that on my local file system, the Unicode chars worked fine (when
established manually), but when copying them out to another shared file
system, some characters got translated even further, e.g. the "Ã" (U+00C3) to
"A". I did not investigate whether this is courtesy to the copy program, or to
the target file system, but in any case it seems to me a good idea would be to
offer the choice between having Unicode chars in the file names and creating
the file names using the respective %-escapes, in order to increase the
portability.

Andy