stripping whitespace in templates?

does anyone have a suggestion as to how i could create a plugin/ 
filter that would strip certain kinds of whitespace during the  
template generation phase?

my templates all have a fair amount of spaces / tabs / carriage  
returns to make templates human readable

it also bulks stuff up about 15% ( i haven't tested the space  
difference using gzip compression, or any difference in speed  
gzipping a stripped document vs a nonstripped )

it seems to me though, that i could probably cut bandwidth by 7% or  
so if i regexed my templates, so i'd like to look into it

anyone have a clue where i could insert the function?  within petal?   
within mkdoc ?