<p>I'm on OS X 10.5.5 (though it does not matter much I guess)</p>

<p>I have a set of text files with fancy characters like double backquotes, ellipsises ("...") in one character etc. </p>

<p>I need to convert these files to good old plain 7-bit ASCII, preferably without losing character meaning (that is, convert those ellipses to three periods, backquotes to usual "s etc.).</p>

<p>Please advise some smart command-line (bash) tool/script to do that.</p>

iconv
should do it, as far as I know. Not 100% certain about how it handles conversions where one input character should/could become several output characters, such as with the ellipsis example ... Something to try!
Update: I did try it, and it seems it doesn't work. It fails, possibly since it doesn't know how to express ellipsis (the test character I used) in a "smaller" encoding. Converting from UTF-8 to UTF-16 went fine. :/ Still, iconv might be worth investigating further.