I had to place \reference[]{} in various places in my document as I need to refer to page numbers of a lot of various items in the document. There are hundreds of these. When placing them, I hadn't realized it would impact the document design--I assumed such a command would be invisible.
Though I've tried placing as many inside the section titles, where they become invisible, I've found just placing \reference[]{} anywhere on a page will create extra blank spaces, leading my document to expand from 440 lines to 448. It added up quite quickly to 8 whole pages. No matter how much I use % or try to hide it within the page, it still produces weird results. It isn't invisible, its doing things to the document, moving text around, leaving gaps. In addition, it makes the document look haphazard, creating random formatting "glitches".

I'm assuming because \reference has a curly bracket {} that its causing something to be rendered, even it its not really something visible always, it often makes a carriage return on the page if placed say after a table, or before a section title. Sadly, the way the document was designed I don't have a way to integrate them inside the section titles everywhere, there are too many and some need to mark a specific page within a section.
I haven't placed anything inside the {} and only use the square brackets to mark the reference name. Is there an alternative command that won't occupy space like this?
--Joel