No proprietary software was used during the composition of this book. Drafts were typeset from XML-DocBook master files created with GNU Emacs. PostScript generation was performed with Tim Waugh's xmlto, Norman Walsh's XSL stylesheets, Daniel Veillard's xsltproc, Sebastian Rahtz's PassiveTeX macros, the TeTeX distribution of Donald Knuth's TeX typesetter, and Thomas Rokicki's dvips postprocessor. All the diagrams were composed by the author using pic2graph driving gpic and grap2graph driving Ted Faber's grap implementation (grap2graph was written by the author for this project and is now part of the groff distribution). The entire toolchain was hosted by stock Red Hat Linux.

The cover art is a composite of two images from the original Zen Comics by Ioanna Salajan. It was adapted and colored mainly by Jerry Votta, but the author and GIMP had a hand in the work.