Photocopy and destroy. The mission. shake shit up, tell it like it is, don't kiss the bosses ass, rage against the machine... that is if that's your choice for a zine. Or keep up with the Kardashians, the latest powder puff pop punk tart rock radio tedium. Your choice. In the world of xerox zinedom you're putting your money where you mouth is.
The biggest obstacles I faced in the years of publishing (besides being horrible with deadlines, a self depricating, over-analytical humdrum) was having enough money to maintain my computer system to keep everything up and running.
Before the whole world went to the web, i had a h/p printer, corel draw, some bad pagemaker knock off, an electric typewritter, glue, paste and access to a xerox machine that was able to enlarge and/or reduce [very revolutionary function] in it's day. I added a scsi xerox machine which caused all sorts of hardware headaches which I'm not going to get into. Since they could've been resolved knowing the right people, but most of my peers were all about gaming systems rather than computers.
Other things that made my primitive system complete was the fact that i had a fairly large font library. I was able to do some layout for cassette demos that took a million years to print out. Then I'd head over to the new Kinkos and run off the cards on decent stock paper.
BUT wait, I was writing about not having enough money to keep my system up to date. Nowadays there are awesome alternatives to the expensive software that I was using. The biggest reason I would say why you should publish a zine these days is probably more narcissitic in the sense that it documents YOUR existence. Plus it's semi permanent. Most of the shit that I posted online in "blogs" and or geocities no longer exists. Dead files and they don't even show up on archive.org's wayback machine.
So where do I start? A great program for word processing and a sweet alternative to MS Office is Open Office. It's free and beats having to use a commodore 64 and an old electric typewriter. I can't say enough good things about this program, it's compatible with your major file types.
To set up/layout your zine I recommend scribnus . If you've ever heard people talk about pagemaker or quark this is certainly up to par with those programs if you're using it to make a zine.
If you have photos that you're going to use in your zine, GIMP will be useful to manipulate them in the same manner that photoshop would help you out. If you're looking for a nifty program that will also help you with tweaking photos and incorporating graphics into your zine, you can use Inkscape which is right up there with corel draw and illustrator. If you need fonts to jazz up your lay out check out dafont.com .
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