Editing indexing tags

When indexing a document in Writer the tags are hidden. Is there any way of making them explicit and so searchable and directly editable?

I just have some problems with the indexing software, which I find onerous, and I think I could make it much quicker to use if I could write a few macros myself.

One option I'm looking at is to convert the whole thing to LaTex and use explicit tags there, with perhaps write some Perl scripts. But that sounds a bit drastic. But if it's in text mode I can write scripts to edit it.

Regards,

Ian Fantom