Ahem. Disregard the "Nor can I see them when someone else generates them." remark re epic. As the rest of the account makes clear, I can see them; I just can't enter the things.
I'll take a look into this
Yep, ~/.ircii is ignored, but ~/.ircrc will be read by either of epic or ircii. To get the high bit characters working, you have to use the following options (from the doc/outputhelp file that wasn't previously included...) /set eight_bit ON /set high_bit_escape 0 But, as I can't see any reason not to include these by default (they don't seem to have any disasterous effects for me), I'll go ahead and turn this on by default in epic-1.0.1-7 and later as well as including the rest of the docs in the package