This system was believed to have originated in Spain as an export pattern. The Spanish spread it to Portugal, southern Italy, Malta, the Spanish Netherlands, and as far as Peru but was probably never popular in its homeland. Instead of using "la pinta", these decks used abbreviations as indices at the top and sometimes also the bottom of the card. A difference between the Portuguese and "Italo-Portuguese" patterns was that the Portuguese decks lacked rank 10 pip cards like the Spanish patterns, while "Italo-Portuguese" decks have them like northern Italian patterns.