The service books of the Church of the East — the Ḥudra and the Taksa — run in ruled columns of Syriac on buff rag paper. Two inks do all the work: a dark brown-black for the text, a lead red for headings, incipits and the directions that tell a deacon what to do next. Nothing is boxed; sections are cut apart by a red rule.

Where a section opens, a headpiece of drawn interlace carries purple, navy, yellow and red as line, never as fill. Where one closes, the plain Church-of-the-East cross stands alone — no corpus, no figures. The whole page is ink on a flat leaf, and the design keeps it that way.