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

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

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!

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.