Sinclair QL Beginner's Manual page 123

Since a substantial amount of character printing is involved it is best to start planning in terms of the
pixel screen. You can see that you need to provide for twelve lines of characters with some space
between lines and a total screen height of 256 pixels.
It is useful to recall that the possible character heights are 10 pixels or 20 pixels. It is obvious that the
10 pixel height must be used to allow space for a proper layout.
The number of character positions across the screen must be estimated. If we adopt the convention
of "T" for ten instead of "10" all card values can be represented as a single character. Suppose that
we also allow a maximum of eight cards of the same suit as a first approach. We can reconsider the
problem again if necessary That would require a total of 10 characters for each hand. The across
requirement is therefore:
west hand + table width + east hand
Allowing a space between characters that would be:
20 + table width + 20
The decision now depends on which screen mode you choose. The 256 mode will cope with the
problem, as you will see later, but first we will work in 512 pixel mode. The smallest character width is
six pixels which would give a total of 240 pixels + table width. The diagram will have some balance if
we have a table width of about half of 240.
We should therefore experiment with a table width of about 120 pixels which may be adjusted. A little
testing produced the layout shown.