groff alternative?

Hello,

I'm using NO_CXX in my make.conf to strip down the base system to ~50MB 
including man pages. The only problem is that groff is missing if I don't 
build c++, and even if I build groff itself and the needed libstdc++ it costs 
me about 10MB. If I just skip NO_CXX it's only 500k more, so I moved my 
patches to /dev/null.

Now I wrote a port for GNU/groff, but this also consumes 9974k by default and 
I don't want to include patches into that port to strip down groff, if that 
was possible at all.

Does anybody know any alternative for the groff part to view man pages simply 
with the man command? It's horrible that the filter needs more space than all 
the manpages itself!

And of course, even if I decide to leave system man pages outside the flash 
card I still may want to read man pages of installed packages (which is 
another mountpoint on my installation, so there may be no space limit, 
depending on the card and additional drives)

Thanks,

-Harry