Removing spaces, tabs, not newlines

[alexvoss]

I am producing Markdown with Jinja2. As Markdown uses spaces/tabs, I need to be careful about indentation, so I have trim_blocks and lstrip_blocks enabled. At the same time, I do need newlines between Markdown blocks. My question: is there a way to remove spaces and tabs but leave newlines as they are? I have tried to use manual whitespace control but the only thing that helped in the end was to remove whitespace from the code, which makes it less readable.

[alexvoss]

Alternatively, how can I remove all whitespace but explicitly insert a newline?