Fillable forms

A friend of mine teaches photography to people out of her house. She would like to make up forms which she can email to her students, have them fill out and email back. I'm looking for some recommendations on which software/methods to use that would make this process easiest for her and hopefully inexpensive. Some apps (such as PDFpen Pro) allow you to make fillable PDF's but the process seems overly complex and not as mac like as it should be. PDFpen Pro, along with Adobe Acrobat Pro (which costs more than my friend wants to spend) both seem to rely on dragging boxes in a document in order to create a fillable field. This just seems imprecise and I'm hoping there are other pieces of software out there or another way to use these applications that make creating a fillable form easier. Any ideas?

Acrobat Pro has a wizard that will go through and place the fields for you automatically. If you're consistent in how you create the areas for it to fill (usually I use a fixed number of underscores) you'll get the same size field, automatically, for each.

I know you mentioned Acrobat Pro is more than you want to spend. Just letting you know it can do this.