Untar the file in a directory called issue_0X (pick your favourite number).
Try "make_pdf_article editorial" and "make_pdf_article book_review-bash_a_z"; look at them, then try "make_pdf_issue".
The articles and the issue will be in tex_stuff/ as pdf files.
As you will see, there are the crop marks and the images are hires. You can generate med and low res (without crop marks) by editing the file tex_stuff/issue_head.tex. You have to replace the word "printing" in the preamble with "subscriber" or "electronic". I think that's all. Oh, no. The lores and medres images are obtained by ImageMagick: if you find this feature useful, I'll send you the script to do the conversions. Last thing: an issue has a barcode. To generate it, change the corresponding entry in the file issue_head.tex to suit your needs, and install GNU barcodes. The classes are taylored to work with letter paper. I planned to program some paper independence, as well as a look "transformation", but I have no time for. Surely I forgot a lot of things, but I'm here to answer any question.
In case of windows: the scripts you should run merge two file to get the master TeX files. You can do it by hand or using type. When typesetting a single article you will edit the article.tex file to write the article name.