>>75
Heh, then it's up to you to decide what's more of a pain in the ass. UTF-8 to the correct codepoints, or the long hex notation.
Correct me if I'm wrong (don't know enough about encoding), but can't you take the straight UTF-8 and base64 it? Base64 is perfect for arbitrary binary data, which you could surely interpret UTF-8 as, right?

Alt-keypad: Whatever it is, I'm sure it's nasty. I don't really know what I'm doing in Linux as regards keyboards and charsets, so it's something I stay away from. And copy and paste isn't a real feasible option. Further exacerbated when not in a GUI...