[Gary[_3_]]

Thanks for the reply. I was afraid of that.

Thankfully, you can set the REF field to preserve its format when you update
so (so far) the format has "stuck" after updating (F9).

The other annoying thing is that if the cross-reference is the entire
paragraph (such as when I'm mapping a chapter and have all of the Heading 1
titles in a bullet list) if I apply the character format to just the text
(and don't include the paragraph mark) it still formats the paragraph and my
bullets turn blue. So I have to add a dummy character at the end of each
bullet item, format the cross-reference text, and then delete the dummy
character.