When one runs “pydoc with”, the output is a block of text marked up with reST.  It would be more helpful to render it as text or HTML thanks to a minimal reST parser and transformer.

In http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-July/101563.html, Martin Geisler (Mercurial dev) said:

“We're using light-weight ReST markup in the Mercurial help texts and
transform it into straight text upon display in the terminal.

We want no external dependencies for Mercurial, so I wrote a "mini ReST"
parser in about 400 lines of code. It cheats a lot and can only handle
simple constructs...” [A few messages later] “I would be happy to relicense it under the Python license.”

So, proposed battle plan:
1) Agree this feature request is desirable.

2) Agree on the inclusion of mg’s minirst, which provides an reST parser and a plain text formatter.

3) Add an HTML formatter.

4) Wire minirst into pydoc.