(Ted Harding) writes:
In terms of capability, therefore, I would not rank TeX as generally better than groff. On the other hand, it is a fact of life that in the academic and technical authoring world, TeX is far more widely used. This is largely because it was adopted with enthusiasm when it first became generally available around 1990, resulting in development of good "wrappers" such as LaTeX and the writing of much excellent documentation; at that time, troff was still hard to use and sparsely documnted. So it is the "industry standard", if you like, espcially for document exchange in that world. You would be cutting yourself off if you worked in that world and did not want to have anything to do with TeX.
I'm afraid I have to rise to this. TeX dates back to around 1978, not much longer after the emergence of n/troff. Knuth performed a major re-write in 1982, changing the original Pascal to his (still Pascal-based) Web system. LaTeX actually dates back to 1984: I still have pre-release copy of Lamport's book dated the following year.
The reason that TeX caught on while n/troff didn't was that TeX was actually much easier to port: it may seem hard to believe now but Pascal compilers were much more widely available than C ones in the early 1980s, and the n/troff sources were restricted by AT&T's licenses to boot. I know because I ported TeX to VAX/VMS in 1982 so that I could use it for my PhD thesis. (I still remember my first page of output, obtained by putting dots onto a sheet of paper with a pen plotter!)
The principal reason for the continuing popularity of (La)TeX is certainly the size of the development community; however, another major factor is that the TeX engine is almost totally bug-free: the only bug report discussed on the TeX-implementers' mailing list in the last couple of years is concerned with i8n issues and the trip test, which is certainly esoteric.
The only place that TeX falls short of n/troff+tbl and hence groff is in the setting of tables, in particular producing entries that span several rows. The pic and graph pre-processors are also more elegant solutions to some forms of graphical typesetting than the TeX-oriented equivalents.
Having said all this, I applaud your group's efforts in entering the book text: I'd hate to see troff disappear totally. Remember: the main advantage of the Unix approach is that it gives us all choice.
..Adrian