remove linefeeds

System

I haven't spent a lot of time on templating recently so this may be an easy one. This project has a lot of Perl embedded in presentation templates. It is broken up into small <iw_perl> blocks. They find that there are a tremendous amount of linefeeds and other whitespace in the generated page which seems to be a result of this. Is there a flag that can be set or some other way to remove excess whitespace from the generated page? How are other companies dealing with this issue?

TeamSite 5.5.2