Bat doesn't recognize that its the manpage.

[aljustiet]

I set the MANPAGER environment variable to bat -l man, but it doesn't render the man page as it would if I ran man bat | bat -l man. How can I make it recognize the manpages as manpages

[keith-hall]

Piping a man invocation into something else changes the way man outputs the manpage - it removes formatting basically. i.e. man bat | cat is already different from man bat. Indeed, bat wasn't designed to syntax highlight text which already contains ANSI escape sequences or weird use of backspace characters to repeat a character to make it bold typewriter style.
The guide for setting the MANPAGER env var (among others) to remove the odd formatting man applies and thus let bat handle it is in the bat readme: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat?tab=readme-ov-file#man