The Velislav Bible is a parchment manuscript of 188 folios containing 747 illuminations. Although the manuscript originally comprised around 800 leaves, several of these – as well as one complete quaternion – were lost, probably during a later rebinding. Most of the folios are divided into two sections of equal dimensions (to enclose two images per folio) edged along their left and right sides with a double red line and separated from one another horizontally by a triple line, as at the upper and lower edges of the text area. This creates a two-line blank space above, below and between the two images, and here the text has been inserted. The only exception to this are those folios on which just one single, full-page scene is depicted.

The text is written in a gothic minuscule used in the first half of the fourteenth century and originates from the pens of five scribes, each of whom was probably allocated those particular quires upon which he was to work. Scribe A was assigned the first six quires (ff. 1r-47v), while Scribe B worked on the seventh to the ninth (ff. 48r-71v). The hand of Scribe C is apparent only at the beginning of the fifth quire (ff. 72r-73v), and throughout the rest of the manuscript the two remaining hands alternate: Scribe D appears in the tenth (although only in part) to thirteenth quires, in the fifteenth to the seventeenth, and on the first page of the nineteenth quire (ff. 74r-103v; 112r-136r), while Scribe E worked on the fourteenth, on the nineteenth (in part) to the twenty-fourth, and on the first page of the twenty-fifth (ff. 104r-111v; 136v-183r). From folio 183v onward no text was provided to accompany the illuminations.

Besides continuous text the manuscript also contains brief captions to accompany the illustrations. Most of these are written in the hand of the corresponding scribe for the given section, although ff. 10r, 40r-52r, 78v-79r, 89v-92r and 97v bear Czech and Latin commentaries written in a rather hasty gothic minuscule and dating probably from the end of the fourteenth century or the first half of the fifteenth, while ff. 1r-22v and 41r contain German commentary in a seventeenth-century German cursive script.