Picky points of pendantry aside, I would guess there are probably third party text editors capatible with WordPress—FCKEditor springs to mind as worth checking.

Also, what code are you using to add white space? One of the reasons it may not be working is that WordPress appears to be correctly programmed to strip out “non-semantic” markup—removing html used incorrectly for presentation rather than content.

“Soft-return” adds a break-tag (return with shift held down) btw—standard to almost every program.

And you could try wrapping a either a span or div tag around content you wish to space and then define some margin or padding, ie

Alternatively you define something similar in your site stylesheet, even make it default for the ol/ul tags.

You can show code by putting in it’s hex equivalent—try entering some code into Dreamweaver’s design view to see what I mean. And there is also an html tag that allows a batch of code to be displayed as is, in the same manner as a literal block in reSt, only I don’t remember off the top of my head what it is.