Technical Question: Differenciation beetween paragraph end and manual linebreak

This a question to the code developer:
In office products like LO/OO there is a big difference between a manual linebreak and the end of a paragraph. In the development of full text search at the interface of LO/OO to LT I used the ‘\n’ as character to separate paragraphs. This is oriented on the way paragraphs are handled by the standalone GUI.
But inside the text provided by the LO/OO-interface the manual linebreaks are also represented by ‘\n’. So the rules can’t differentiate between them.
I would like to replace the linebreaks by ‘\r’ to distinguish them from the ends of paragraph. But i’m afraid of side effects. Do you expect some problems by doing so?
Because of the upcoming freeze, the idea is related to version 4.2.