Well there are a bunch other engines out there, but it just so happens they all eat tex or something very close to it (context). Five or six years or so ago I

Well there are a bunch other engines out there, but it just so happens they all eat tex or something very close to it (context). Five or six years or so ago I used reportlab (in Python) to generate some PDF reports (using the flowables API); it does kinda work but layout is more complicated than in tex and output quality is several notches down. As far as appearance goes, you can make tex look like almost anything, even with fairly low effort.