For as long as I understood your questions correctly, find below my answers:
1 - You can generate get you Digital Certificate by generating you key pair and then sign your public key by any CA (either your own CA or any Publicly trusted CA)
2 - You can make a request to a CA to get your Digital Certificate. Guessing that you want a publicly trusted certificate than you can use a wide range of CA's. I would suggest you to check the Let's Encrypt project, they release free certificates.
Using your digital certificate is a matter of your implementation. Basically you need to know what do you want to achieve with it (like confidentiality, authentication, integrity..). Usually you want to implement SSL to achieve any of these features.
For signing documents you need to encrypt with your private key associated with the public key that was used to get the digital certificate.
3 - As I also stated in the second answer, Yes there are free options for publicly trusted digital certificates