What I love the most about this, is that even though the author only intended (in the near-term, anyway) to use this once, they still A) took care to use some degree of engineering practice, and B) open-sourced the result.

I really love seeing an example of DTP-style typesetting using Java. It's one of those problems that seems really easy, but then you look into it a little bit and decide it's not really worth the effort (and there aren't many practical, independent examples of it in practice). This person not only took the effort – to make something more personally pleasing than TeX – but also took the time to organize their code and share it, in order to decrease the scarcity of such examples.

Kudos.

That is an incredible story of successful yak shaving. I have the same experience, but ultimately my attempts end in failure as I lose interest and sight of the end goal. Kudos!

Wow! I expected a Markdown to LaTeX tool, but the author ended up writing their own engine.

This is just amazing! Really like the result, and also the other personal projects on the site!