Render a LONG manual page, for instance : M-x manual-entry bash ALWAYS triggers this bug for me, on a Fedora 34 x86_64 Linux distro, fully up-to-date as of 2021-11-11 - $ rpm -q emacs emacs-27.2-5.fc34.x86_64 What happens is that sometimes, owing to buffering, only PART of a multi-character terminal escape code written by the man(1) process is read, so since the default man.el is doing fontification on-the-fly, sometimes at some point the whole rest of the manual page appears in bold, or italic, or underlined font. With these changes to man.el, in the attached patch, fontification occurs only once ALL man(1) process output has been read. So the buffer will briefly flash the un-fontified contents, then switch to fully-fontified, with no missing font transitions . This is preferable to the misinterpretation of escape codes due to buffering causing missed font transitions.