symbols in restructuredText

You have a large number of defined symbols via the "substitution" operator.

You have to include the definitions via .. include:: <isonum.txt> or something similar.

Most of them have the form |larr| or |rarr|.

They are defined in the docutils.parsers.rst.include installation directory. There are dozens of files which define numerous Unicode characters.

It was my impression that rst supported Unicode; can you just type in the raw character and let docutils handle encoding for HTML?

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 →