Writing my PhD using groff by Joshua Stutter has detailed comparison of various typesetting tools like
- pdflatex
- lualatex
- xelatex
- latexmk
- tectonic
- context
- wkhtmltopdf
- weasyprint
- pagedjs-cli
- prince
- pdfroff
Mom - Macros for GNU troff is probably the best place to start using groff, piping text input files into pdfmom which handles the preprocessing with refer, tbl, grap and pic.