Here's my patch, along the lines of the work-around I posted earlier. A few remarks:

   1. The modifications in pydoc only touch the four console pagers and the html pager (html.page).

   2. A module-wide default encoding is initialized from locale.getpreferredencoding. Pagers that write to a file use the encoding of that file if defined, else they use the module-wide default. The html pager uses ascii. All of them use xml character entity replacement as fall-back.

   3. An additional set of tests has been added to test.test_pydoc to verify the behaviour of the modifications.

   4. No functionality is broken if Python is built without unicode support.