Apart from the use of paper, the Chester Beatty manuscript is notable for several innovations to Qur'anic calligraphy which heavily influenced the art for centuries. This paper Qur'an, unlike its parchment and vellum predecessors, was oriented vertically rather than horizontally. Breaking from tradition, Ibn al-Bawwab's Qur'an does not use the Kufic script which dominated Islam's first three centuries, instead utilizing more legible cursive scripts. Naskh is used in the main text while the related thuluth script appears in the opening pages as well as the Sura headings and statistical pages containing verse-count. These statistical folios, which began to appear in the semi-Kufic Qur'ans preceding Ibn al-Bawwab, were here expanded to include additional information such as the total word and letter count of each Sura, the word count of the entire manuscript, and even the number of dotted and undotted letters.