Terence,
I will first reply to your last question. As Dwayne wrote, this forum does not allow posting screenshots, but you can post web links (URLs) to an address where such screenshot or image was uploaded. Many members of this forum use this site:
https://imgur.com/
Now to your problem:
I wish you could upload a screenshot illustrating what you call “fields in vertical and horizontal views together.” This is not clear to me so my answer may not be what you are looking for.
InDesign (ID) uses layers very similarly to Photoshop, that is as a pile of platters metaphor, that is the topmost layer covers the one below it (unless the object has transparency) and so on. You can create as many layers as you wish, limited only by your computer’s memory.
Not going into what “fields in vertical and horizontal views together” means, my understanding is that you can create three layers:
1. for the PNG graphic
2. (above 1) for the rectangle that should sit on top of the PNG graphic
3. (above 2) for a text box that will sit above the rectangle.
In the Layers menu the layers should be placed in this order: 3 (topmost), 2 and 1.
If this is not what your problem is, please submit a screenshot using the site mentioned above.
Good luck
Tom

My guess is that you have 9 front pages which are numbered with letters or roman numerals and then numbering starts again. In this case, page 1 would be physical page 10, page 11 would be page 2 and so on.

I am not sure about this suggestion but here it goes anyway…
The only reason I can think about is that your client used a previous version of ID and you are using a recent one (BTW, which version are you using?)
Check this hypothesis doing the following:
1. Export the text from the original file that does not aligns
2. Remove (delete) the text from this file; do not save the file.
3. Import again the exported text into the not saved file and see what happens.
4. Now load again the original file and repeat steps 1. and 2., but now save the empty file, before going to step 3. If the text did not align after step 3. in the first test, but does aligns after step 4. in the second test then my supposition is confirmed ;-)

blank

Anna, please submit a sketch of what you wish to accomplish. I am pretty sure that ID can do what you wish but from your description it is difficult to visualize the final effect.
My assumption is that you wish to place a text inside a trapezoid. Is this right?
Tom

Hello Anne-Marie,
As in ID, all these programs used text boxes and one could define vertical justification for each one or for all.
But here stops the similarity to ID. For some weird reason those who wrote IDs code linked/forced vertical justification with several other parameters, like, for instance orphans and widows (keep options – which is the major offender) and some even weirder image boxes “attraction-repulsion” feature (like if a box would have its “own life” irregularly attracting or repelling texts around when one applies text wrap to them). As far as I could diagnose this, all is related to a concept that Dwayne mentioned. All text paragraphs have to obey certain rules of spacing/leading multiples for baseline grid to work. It just happens that this is almost impossible in a complex layout, as I mentioned previously. On the other hand the 3 programs mentioned did not imposed such limitations. Vertical justification could be nicely fit by playing with leading, tracking, kerning and of course with fractional type sizes and paragraph spacing overrides in text box.
And believe it or not, Ventura Publisher, the first DTP for PCs (PageMaker came later) was a very powerful and well designed program. It did not have all IDs bells and whistles, but it performed magnificently even with complex layouts. One of its best features was anchoring images or boxes to text. As text changed and flowed, it would push up or down the linked object, but when it did not fit on the same pages, it would push it to the top of the next (or previous) page and place a mark on it, calling the user attention. Re-anchoring was a breeze, all one needed to do was to drag the image or box to a new position.
Since this does not works well in ID, my trick is to flow first all the text of a chapter or document, then layout page by page, without using anchors, making sure that everything on page 1 looks right. Then I proceed to the next, and so on. Even so, when it comes to vertical justification of two or more columns documents, it is a nightmare in ID.
A nostalgic note :-) Ventura Publishes did not run under Windows (Windows would be invented 1 or 2 years later), rather created inside a DOS’ characters-only environment a graphical one. Don’t ask me how they did it, but there was a Xerox “Windows” that run Ventura Publisher. In other words an emulation of a graphical environment.

My 5 cents: I had a very similar problem while layouting in a magazine style a 500 pages book with over 400 images and hundreds of boxes. Let me tell you this: even if one follows Dwayne’s recommendations (which are good), in this kind of publication ID falls short of all previous DTP software. In my case, spending dozens of days I was able to come up with a reasonable layout, but far from what I wished. Simply put, ID is NOT the ideal software for complex layouts, with several fonts (32 in my case), images of several sizes and imbedded boxes. In PageMaker, Quark and Ventura Publisher this was a breeze.