Is it must necessary to apply a tapering to the signal before the bandpass filtering using filtfilt?

In the help doc of filtfilt, it says "filtfilt minimizes start-up and ending transients by matching initial conditions ..." I don't know what this exactly means.

I always need to taper the ends of the signal to avoid artificial waveform before using filtfilt, or there is something done in the filtfilt function so that the tapering is not necessary?