[mcless]

Why not use something like http://github.com/susam/texme as a starting point? Really easy to turn any Markdown document into a rendered HTML with a single line of code in the header.

This rendered HTML could be converted to PDF and printed or the self-rendered HTML itself could be printed directly.

[kijin]

There are a whole bunch of similar tools written in all sorts of languages, and OP just chose what he's most familiar with. It just happened to be different from your favorite toolchain.

It also looks like OP's book was split into several Markdown files, one for each chapter. So he would have needed some sort of build script anyway if he wanted to use texme on the combined document. He would also have needed more than a single line of code in the header, since he wanted some custom styling for blockquotes and code snippets.