The standard printed volume has 1430 pages, called angs, limbs, and the pagination is identical in every copy; Sikhs cite by ang the way other traditions cite by chapter and verse. It opens with the Mul Mantar, the statement of one being, timeless and self-existent, and then the Japji Sahib of Guru Nanak, recited at dawn. It closes with miscellaneous compositions and Guru Arjan's Mundavani, the seal.
Between those, the arrangement is musical. The bulk of the text is divided into thirty-one ragas, the classical modes of North Indian music, and within each raga by the metrical form of the hymn and then by author in order of succession. A hymn's placement tells a performer how it is to be sung; the scripture is designed for kirtan, sung performance, and that is how it is chiefly encountered in a gurdwara. The compositions run to some 5,894 hymns and are largely in verse.
The authorship is deliberately wide. Six of the ten Gurus contributed, Nanak, Angad, Amar Das, Ram Das, Arjan and Tegh Bahadur, along with bards and attendants of the Guru's court. Beyond them stands the bhagat bani, the compositions of fifteen devotional poets who were not Sikh: Kabir, the weaver of Banaras, most heavily represented; Namdev and Trilochan from Maharashtra; Ravidas, a leather-worker and therefore an untouchable by caste; Jaidev, Ramanand, Dhanna, Pipa, Sain, Sadhana, Beni, Parmanand, Surdas, Bhikhan; and the Muslim Sufi Sheikh Farid. Their inclusion is not an anthologist's courtesy. It states a position: that truth spoken by a Hindu low-caste cobbler or a Muslim Sufi belongs in Sikh scripture on the same page as the Gurus. The script is Gurmukhi, but the languages are several, an old Punjabi and Hindavi core, with Braj, Sanskrit, Persian, Sindhi and Marathi elements.