Reply To: cross reference is squishing text

That's coming from InDesign's justification engine. It's very tricky justifying text in such a narrow column, regardless of auto-inserted items such as page references, but there are some paragraph style settings that can help.

You could turn off justification completely and allow the text to rag right, but if that's not an option you can improve matters by adjusting the Justification settings in your text paragraph style:

In the Justification dialog, try setting Letter Spacing to minimum -3% and maximum 3%, and Glyph Scaling to minimum 99% (or even 98%) and maximum 101-102%. You can set the Word Spacing minimum to 90%. These will allow InDesign's paragraph composer more freedom to create a more even text color than the defaults, but you may still have to do some copy editing to avoid super-compressed or super-spaced lines of text. The Paragraph Composer and Single-Line Composer will do their best to stick with the limits you've allowed them, but on occasion will override them where a word just can't be hyphenated. Those overrides will show up with a yellow highlight in Normal view if you've enabled “H&J Violations” in Edit>Preferences>Composition.

You can also use custom tracking, turn off the Paragraph Composer, insert manual line breaks and use No Break or soft hyphens to tweak the text.

As a general rule, it's best to go ahead and get all your text set before you make your “fine tuning” pass to tweak the typography, and it's best done from front to back, because any adjustments you make will affect the text that follows.