I'm totally stealing this: "Hacking is where craft and craftiness converge." Unfortunately the license is "No Derivatives" so copying small pieces does not fall under the license. Neither would using it in a business because it's "Non-commercial".
Yeah I'm not expecting anything bad to happen, even from the larger chunk I just pasted to Facebook. I just think "No derivatives" is one of the most counter productive of the creative commons licenses.
(edit) I'd love to be wrong about this and discover that it was produced with Open Source software, but given that this is clearly print-ready, I'd be surprised if it wasn't. Once you start interfacing with the actual hardware of printing, you need to dot your i's and cross your t's in regards to preflighting the PDF. InDesign & Acrobat are still top of the game there.
Both MOM and ConTeXt have out-of-the-box support for the page edge markings on the pages in this document. I don't know how much of what you're talking about that relates to. It looks awfully nice to have come from open source software, sad to say.
Actually it's not the proof marks that lead me to assume InDesign. It's the Adobe-Offset-Printing-Industrial-Complex. Most professional, high volume offset printers can take any old PDF you throw at them and whip it into shape for their own use, but when you start doing book production and want things to go your way, you are going to start doing things like detailed preflight testing/tweaking of the PDF in Acrobat, for instance. And InDesign just does a better job than anything else out there at getting PDFs ready for print (not just the "visibles" like the trim lines and registration marks, but the many weird issues that can creep into moderately complex PDFs).
Typing this on my Linux machine, and I'd sincerely love to be wrong about this, but Adobe is like the device driver for the physical book publishing world.
I'd love to know more about these tweaks. I recently typeset a book for my in-laws and am having it a handful of copies printed through an on-demand publisher. I think it looks great (produced by ConTeXt) but you've got me curious about what sorts of things might be done to improve it.
If you are just doing basic monochrome text, no images, you can probably ignore 99% of this stuff. But any moderately complex document needs to be preflighted to make sure that it gets printed the way you intend.
Generally when preflighting, I'm shooting for PDF/X or PDF/A compliance as well as, even without being strictly compliant, making sure that there are no document structure issues that are going act like a hangnail when the printer is trying to either digitally print the file or prepare it for offset printing.
It's easy to think that a PDF is a PDF, but there are so many different things that can be stuffed into one and so many variations on how graphics and text containers format and interact that results can be surprising, particularly at 7pm on Friday with an expected Monday delivery.
E.g. should that text with an opacity value be flattened? What if there is an image behind it? And a gradient? (actual recent example).
I've had cases where the document "just won't print past page 40" (again, this past year). Why? No one knew. The technician handling the document was not good at troubleshooting. Acrobat preflight had passed it fine. There was an empty text frame on that page that the digital printer was choking on.
I won't even touch on color issues here, but they can be equally thorny.
