I’m afraid none of your requests can be achieved.
Index entries are stored as individual entries without correlation to each other. Entries are then sorted and each one is edited as a paragraph. Since this paragraph is internally generated, it is impossible to edit it to remove the paragraph mark.
As for 1), you’re doomed to live with individual paragraphs.
As mentioned, there is no correlation between entries. When creating one, there is no notion of “starting entry”, nor of “ending entry” which would allow to mark a long sequence as related to a single index entry. You can indeed insert one entry at the beginning of the sequence and the same entry at the end. They will be merged in the same index paragraph.
The merge process can be somehow controlled but i’m not sure if it fits completely your need.
Right-click on the index and Edit index to open the index dialog. Go to Type tab. Check Combine identical entries option if not already done. You can then also check Combine with -.
From a test on one of my documents, I don’t understand clearly in which contexts it gives a range instead of a list, but it’s worth a try.
I don’t see how to generate sv because it corresponds to an open range and this concept does not exist in the index entries.
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EDIT 2018-06-27 about Protect against manual changes
When this box is ticked, the index is read-only and you can’t change it from what is internally generated.
When this box is unticked, the index is considered as “normal” text, i.e. you can select words, erase or style them, add new terms in the index. This a manual edit. You can save your document and when you reopen it you find it in the state you left it.
But …
The index does not correspond to “real” text: it is generated text collected from markups in your main text. It is then sorted and the resultant sequence is paragraphs is written in the area which has been designated as the index location. This location has a start and an end point. Full stop.
As a consequence, if you Tools>Update>Indexes & Tables or Update all, the collected data will replace the old index between the start and end points. All previous manual editing vanishes. In a sense, it is logical: the individual entries may have changed; how would you transfer an emphasis from a word into a replaced one? where would be moved an insertion? what would be the target of a deletion? Remember that you may not even have the same number of entries after your main text update.
This is why manual index editing is discouraged because you’ll lose it very easily. In case you really have no other solution (because of limitations inherent to the feature, special requirements, …) do it as the very last operation on your document, just before transmitting it to the printshop.
I checked it works.
