I want to use some symbols in restructuredText; how can I do this? (e.g. → in Markdown yields the "→" symbol as defined in the list of standard HTML character entities -- see also w3c reference)
Note: I don't want to require math formula support as a dependency.
I think you were looking for this: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/roles.html#raw
You can define the following role:
.. role:: raw-html(raw)
:format: html
And then you can write:
This way :raw-html:`→`
Which renders like this:
This way →
I had a similar problem when making html from .rst files containing the ± character in Windows using Sphinx. Changing the file encoding from windows-1252 to UTF-8 fixed it for me.
Simply open with notepad, Save As..., and change Encoding: to UTF-8