Index: docutils-0.8.1/docutils/frontend.py
===================================================================
--- docutils-0.8.1.orig/docutils/frontend.py
+++ docutils-0.8.1/docutils/frontend.py
@@ -33,6 +33,7 @@ import sys
 import warnings
 import ConfigParser as CP
 import codecs
+import locale
 import optparse
 from optparse import SUPPRESS_HELP
 import docutils
@@ -193,7 +194,36 @@ def make_paths_absolute(pathdict, keys,
                 value = make_one_path_absolute(base_path, value)
             pathdict[key] = value
 
+def _bytes_path_to_unicode(path):
+    '''Change a byte str path segment into unicode
+
+    Note that this is arguably wrong for Unix systems.  Unix filesystem paths
+    are bytes that programs interpret as characters.  Filesystem paths are in
+    no way guaranteed to be decodable into unicode.  So this could traceback
+    if the locale_encoding can't deal with any byte string and it could give
+    wrong values if the locale_encoding does not match the encoding of
+    a single one of the path component's values.
+
+    However, the rest of docutils is turning command line args containing
+    filenames into unicode so switching to unicode is more inline with the
+    strategy taken by the rest of docutils.
+    '''
+    # converting to Unicode (Python 3 does this automatically):
+    if sys.version_info < (3,0):
+        # TODO: make this failsafe and reversible
+        # locale.getpreferredencoding is not to be preferred to getlocale or
+        # getdefaultlocale but it is preferred to hardcoding a value.  We end
+        # with latin-1 because it's one of the encodings that is valid for
+        # every byte.
+        encoding = locale_encoding or locale.getpreferredencoding() or 'latin-1'
+        path = unicode(path, encoding)
+    return path
+
 def make_one_path_absolute(base_path, path):
+    if isinstance(base_path, unicode) and not isinstance(path, unicode):
+        path = _bytes_path_to_unicode(path)
+    elif isinstance(path, unicode) and not isinstance(base_path, unicode):
+        base_path = _bytes_path_to_unicode(base_path)
     return os.path.abspath(os.path.join(base_path, path))
 
 def filter_settings_spec(settings_spec, *exclude, **replace):