How to define whitespace for certain rules but else ignore it
I think you're approaching this the wrong way. Writing spaces is better handled as a problem of parsing, not of defining your grammar. That is, your grammar should only concern itself with lists of 'tokens' and your parser is concerned with transforming text into 'tokens' properly.

In a sense, whitespace is something the grammar should be completely unaware of. Whitespace can be useful for your parser to determine whether something is one or two tokens, but I doubt that you want to consider whitespace as a token by itself.