Creating an index in InDesign CS3 - is there any way to limit where and for what it looks?

Question

I'm creating an index for a 300-page book using InDesign CS3 on both a PC with Windows XP home and a MacPro with OS X Leopard (I take this book back and forth between these two computers). I have created this as a book (.indb) file so I can use the Index panel with the book option checked to include all of the book chapters.
There are two things I was wondering how to do, if they can be done at all.
1 - I want the index to look for entries in the main pages only, not in the master pages.
2 - I'd like to be able to do only attributed text. For example, I'd like the index to find only the word people when it is bold and italic, and not all of the other places it may occur. Can I do this with a style also, paragraph and/or character?
Thanks so much,
Marcy

Answer 1

Read http://help.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WS8721440D-5F68-4fd6-8115-CA3BEDACF001a.html (the online Help on indexes) -- it will probably answer a few questions.
One I do know immediately is your question on "picking up" stuff from master pages and only with formatting. InDesign does not make an index for you -- you have to (oh! manual labor!) mark the words that should appear in the index yourself. So just don't mark them on master pages, or when not bold and/or italic. You might be wondering about that little button "Mark all instances", well, it does what it say, and in your case you do not want to mark all instances.
The Capitalization issue is, AFAICR, somewhere in the Help; and so is your singular/plural stuff. The latter one is easy solved: if you mark a word to be indexed, ID asks you in a friendly dialog how it should be included, and that defaults to the current selected phrase, but you are free to edit the text in that dialog. ID does not mark the word or phrase; it inserts an invisible marker inside the to-be-indexed word that contains all information you enter in the Add Index Entry dialog, and it uses that to determine what page number to add. (That invisible marker is visible with "Show Invisible Characters", and can be cut, pasted and deleted at will -- so to remove a water melon, find the marker, and delete it.)