Just re-posting this during daylight hours to give it a little more traction:

I have a pen pal who has been making zines using Microsoft Publisher 98 since, well, probably around 1998 (to my astonishment). His PC finally died, he replaced it with a new one, and got the latest version of Publisher, but he says it'll no longer be supported as of late next year. (I'm under the impression he doesn't use the internet, but maybe new Publisher requires the internet?).

Is there anything free and open source that I could send him in the mail on a USB drive that would be more or less similar to Publisher 98 and that would run on a modern Windows PC?

I figure some #software and #opensource folks out there might have some ideas.