History Main / WritingIndentationClue

* Anytime ''Series/DrQuinnMedicineWoman'' has needed to invoke LoopholeAbuse to get the local telegraph operator to tell her about a message that he sent (he's taken an oath to keep such communications private), she'll usually take the notepad that he wrote the message on and shade it to find out what was transmitted.

* ''Series/MidsomerMurders'': In "Death in a Chocolate Box", Barnaby rubs a pencil over the notebook in the VictimOfTheWeek's office to discover the last thing he wrote was a letter. Although Barnaby only gets the last part of the note, it is enough to tell him the letter exists and may have been the reason why he was murdered.

* It took nine games including all spin-off games, but this trope finally appears in the ''Franchise/AceAttorney'' series, in ''[[VisualNovel/PhoenixWrightAceAttorneySpiritOfJustice Spirit of Justice]]''[='s=] DLC case.

* In an episode of ''Series/{{Monk}}'', "Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine," Monk suspects that something is wrong with suicide victim Marlene Highsmith's suicide note. At first, he doesn't seem to know or care what is wrong because he is on Dioxynl, but when Monk goes off the drug, he realizes that the note was not Marlene's because it was written with a red pen, and there is no red pen in the kitchenette the note was written in. Monk takes the writing tablet the note was written on and uses chalk rubbing to reveal Marlene's actual suicide note - a confession that her ex-husband Lester Highsmith is staging an armored car robbery, that happens to be going down right at the moment Monk and Sharona discover the note. Lester had written the suicide note the police found and staged a drive-by shooting a few blocks away to keep the cops away while he switched out notes.

** In "All in the Family," Flack goes to Danny's apartment looking for him since he didn't show up to work. He notices indentations on a program from Ruben Sandoval's memorial service and uses this technique to figure out where Danny went.
** "Late Admissions" has the motive revealed by this type of clue in the BodyOfTheWeek's notebook. The victim had discovered a dextroamphetamine abuse epidemic in his high school and was going to blow the whistle on it to ''The New York Times''.

* In ''Film/{{Tusk}}'', detective Guy Lapointe uses this method to reveal an address Wallace had written down on a note pad before his subsequent disappearance. Teddy notes that he recognizes the trick from ''Film/TheBigLebowski'', and Lapointe admits that's where he learned it.