With PEP 563, it is legal to annotate a function as follows

def foo(bar: 'int') -> 'bool': pass

Currently, help(foo) would print the exact signature in foo.__annotations__ and it's not really pretty.  My proposal is to use the type hints from typing.get_type_hints to make documentations more readable from the user's perspective.  I might not be aware of all use cases and disadvantages of this proposal however.

I traced it down to inspect.formatannotation(annotation).  Before checking for isinstance(annotation, type), IMHO we should do something like

import typing

if isinstance(annotation, str):
    annotation = typing.ForwardRef(str)._evaluate(annotation)

However, is is not aware of globals and especially locals of help caller, so I guess more sophisticated solution is required.

typing.get_type_hints can be used for this, it resolves the annotation string.

>>> def foo(bar: 'int') -> 'bool': pass
...
>>> typing.get_type_hints(foo)
{'bar': <class 'int'>, 'return': <class 'bool'>}