As the title suggests, no unicode characters can be present in entry names, else upon attempting to unzip the archive, errors are thrown with illegal file names (tested using character é).
A fix was found: remove the explicit encoding of CombineArchive.java:216, and the files are packed and read properly by a variety of tools.
Map<String, String> zip_properties = new HashMap<String, String> ();
zip_properties.put ("create", "true");
// zip_properties.put ("encoding", "UTF-8");
boolean existingArchive = zipFile.exists ();