🚀 go-pugleaf

It sounds as if you have two problems, controlling the formats and including inserted text.

In the TOC, after you modify the format of the paragraph tags, or change the format by modifying the Reference page entries, you need to save the TOC file. After that the formats should stay in place.

Then, if you're adding text manually to the file that you want to be preserved from update to update, the text needs to be at the top of the text container that the generated links flow into. If it isn't the first entry, it will be deleted.

You can work around this limitation several ways, by putting the text in a different container on a Master page, importing it as a text insert manually after each update, and so on. But the easiest is to position it in the top position.