Terminals tested: alacritty, mate-terminal, urxvt

bat --version: 0.12.0 (Installed via cargo install bat)

$MANPAGER: bat --paging=never -pl man [1] [2]

[1]: I disabled paging to make sure it's not a problem with less(1).
[2]: The documentation suggests setting MANPAGER to sh -c "col -b | bat -pl man" however I found using col actually just garbled the output even more, see screenshot further down.

Output with MANPAGER='bat -pl man'

Output with MANPAGER='' or MANPAGER='less'

The issue seems to be with highlighting functions / page references (foo(...)) when bold output is used.

When using col -b as suggested, it becomes even worse:

Output with MANPAGER='sh -c "col -b | bat -pl man"'