Yes reader is free, acrobat is not. They do offer student/teacher deals for acrobat pro, that is how I ended up with a copy. There probably is something out there that will let you place fill-able form fields in these for free, what program I do not know. But I say get acrobat as the extras are too good. Like you have a pdf but can not copy and paste the text from it. Acrobat has a pretty good scanner and will convert a picture pdf into a pdf that can be copied from. There will be some errors like commas and periods mixed up, but I can live with that. I need to find time to figure out how to make pdf's that look like Saga material.