Yeah, when we load the text from a source file we automatically translate the smart quotes to plain so they don't confuse the compiler. Did Lua 5.2 handle that? I know 5.3 and 5.4 don't.. I'm not sure what you mean about loading the text in from a file. If you've got L“R” in a file encoded as UTF-8 then load it into Lua, the string will have the 8 bytes as above--Lua doesn't decode that UTF-8 sequence to a Unicode code point. But our text drawing functions do, so you should get the expected result if you pass that string to e.g., gfx.drawText().
If it's not working that way for you can you post a small demonstration project that shows what the error is?
Thanks!