Thank you for the response.
When I run this my odt file has an upper case "A" with a caret over it followed by a dot (indicating space) with a shaded background (as you indicated it would). This would probably work well except for the A with the caret.
Looking at the content.xml file I see that what was a space in my text file is now a 0x
in the file. Thus, three spaces became a total of 12 bytes with the byte pattern being the pattern from the previous sentence repeated 3 times.