Two of the other half-dozen historical troff macro libraries, ms(7) and mm(7) are still in use. BSD Unix has its own elaborate extended macro set, mdoc(7). All these are designed for writing technical manuals and long-form documentation. They are similar in style but more elaborate than man macros, and oriented toward producing typeset output.

A minor variant of troff(1) called nroff(1) produces output for devices that can only support constant-width fonts, like line printers and character-cell terminals. When you view a Unix manual page within a terminal window, it is nroff that has rendered it for you.

The Documenter's Workbench tools do the technical-documentation jobs they were designed for quite well, which is why they have remained in continuous use for more than thirty years while computers increased a thousandfold in capacity. They produce typeset text of reasonable quality on imaging printers, and can throw a tolerable approximation of a formatted manual page on your screen.

They fall down badly in a couple of areas, however. Their stock selection of available fonts is limited. They don't handle images well. It's hard to get precise control of the positioning of text or images or diagrams within a page. Support for multilingual documents is nonexistent. There are numerous other problems, some chronic but minor and some absolute showstoppers for specific uses. But the most serious problem is that because so much of the markup is presentation level, it's difficult to make good Web pages out of unmodified troff sources.

Nevertheless, at time of writing man pages remain the single most important form of Unix documentation.