The ginans were written in Khojki, a script of the Landa family developed for the use of the Khoja communities and used for almost nothing else. That is unusual and consequential. A tradition with its own script is a tradition that can be read by its own members and by nobody else, and the Khojki manuscripts sat outside both the Persian and Arabic manuscript worlds and the Sanskritic one. The great collections of them were assembled and catalogued only in the twentieth century, and the script is now read by specialists rather than by the communities that produced it.
In use the ginans are sung rather than read. Each carries an assigned melody, and the melodies are held by ear rather than notated. Recitation belongs to the jamatkhana, the Ismaili place of gathering and prayer, characteristically in the period before the congregational supplication, and it is done by members of the congregation rather than by an ordained class. Someone recognised as a good reciter acquires a standing that is real but informal.
The corpus occupies a particular place in the community rather than in the wider world. It is not published as a hymnal is published, and its circulation is understood as belonging to the jamat. The atlas therefore describes the tradition, its languages, its manuscripts and its use, and does not reproduce ginan texts, which are the community's to circulate. What can be said about them as history and as literature is said in the scholarship cited here, all of it produced with the community's own institutions.