Kein Standard

In 1914 a few English- and Scotsmen controlled more than half of the globe (most of the seas and chunks of land too, includ­ing millions of Indians).
Kaiser Wilhelm found that unfair. He started a war.
Five years later Germany had shrunk.
Adolf Hitler found that unfair. He started a war.
As one of the results, German is not understood (less written) by most scholars and scien­tists anymore.
So today, there are people reading books and blogs that do not under­stand German.
Therefore, I will repeat in the Lingua Franca of the age, what I have written in German.
In 1834, years after an adequate copy of the Qur'ān was set and printed in St. Peters­burg (later in Kazan)
and when lithograph copies began to be produced in India and Persia,
the German orientalist Gustav Flügel came up with a new typeset copy,
with a text of his own ‒ not very different from rasm, ḍabṭ and ḥarakat recognized by Muslims, but different from the can­on­ized variants never­theless,
and with a numbering system of his Hamburg col­league Abraham Hinckel­mann (which diverges from all Muslim systems and places the numbers BEFORE the verse).


Already the cover shows Flügel incompetence: the little hā' above hā' signals "not a tā' marbuṭa", but in this position (above hā' in hudā), hāʾ can not be tāʾ, so it can not carry an ihmal sign:

The alif (before lām mīm) has no madda. raḥmān and ḏālika should have a dagger alif, Flügel's font doesn't have one. How could any scholar use such a print?

Although it came 50 years too late, it became the standard edition of European orientalists ‒ for about a century.
Later the Egyptian King Fuʾād Edition became the standard ‒ not as I see it ‒ because it was really better than most others, but because it was much better than the orienta­list sorry effort, and because most (Central European) orien­talists ignored the Magh­rebian and Indian prints (Ottoman and Persian prints had a few hundred more alifs as matres lectionis which does not make them inferior, but serves as an argument against them, besides them not indi­cating as­simila­tion of nūn sākin. ‒ Although most Muslims in Germany use Turkish prints, these are avoided by the scholars.)


This was typeset in 1299/1881/2 in the Egyptian Government Press and printed both in one volume (Prince­ton library 2273) and in ten and/or thirty leather bound volumes (on the market and "Exhibi­tion Islam," London).
13 years later printed in Bulaq as well:

In 1914 ‒ when the United Kingdom was at war with the Ottoman Empire ‒ Egypt declared its indepen­dence, the ruler changed from Wālī/Governor to Sulṭān ‒ Khedive had been the personal title, not a function or an office.
Now it was urgent that Egypt printed its own maṣāḥif. The statement that the "foreign ones" (Istan­bul was the capital, not foreign before 1915) had mistakes ‒ without given further informa­tion what and where ‒ is propaganda, no real informa­tion. Repetition does not turn it into fact.

The Shape of the Qur'ān ‒ Guide for Publishers

When I started to write "Kein Standard", I wanted to show that the King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 is not the standard,
that the maṣāḥif printed by the Tāj Company Ltd. are 100 times more often printed, reprinted in other countries and copied in Pakistan and elsewhere.
The 1924 copy was only reprinted once: 1955 by the Communist govern­ment of China ‒
to be precise its text was reproduced, but put into a new frame, with new page headers, with new sura title boxes, new signs on the margin for divi­sions, saǧadāt and sakatāt.
A title page was added ‒ the original didn't have one.
And two pages were thrown out, because King Fuʾād was men­tioned ‒ not republican enough.
In Cairo, it was never reproduced, but some­what improved ‒ some­times its margin reduced.
1952 the Egyptian Govern­ment Press (Amiriyya) pro­duced a "second print,"
different from the 1924 edition at about 900 places.
"That Tāj was more success­ful commer­cially is ir­rele­vant.
The King Fuʾād Edition is superior," one might say.
The opposite is true.
Even if we take the ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā edition printed in Medina, which com­bines 99,8% of the orthography of the 1952 (!) Cairo print with the dis­tri­bution of the text on 604 pages popular in Istanbul around 1900, with a clear and easy to read calligraphy, it is NOT superior to the Tāj Company Ltd edi­tions, it is just as good ‒ see here.

By the time I had finished the book, something else had caught my eye.
First I discovered, that in Cairo more than ten printers (as well as others in Bairut and Tehran) repro­duced the 522-page-muṣḥaf written by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qādir­ġalī
‒ as it was written (in the Ottoman ortho­graphy) still in the 1950s,
‒ in the new orthography (with I have called Q24).
So I learned that publishers just change the masora (little signs around the rasm), verse num­bers, sura title, divisions (juz, ḥizb ...) ‒ and even the rasm (elimi­nating a ḥarf al-madd from time to time) without much ado, with­out informing the public.
Then I noticed that a printer (Aḥmad Šamarlī) had a calligrapher (Muḥ Saʿd al-Haddād) copy the 522-muṣḥaf line by line calli­graphi­cally very similar but in the new (African) orthography.

At first, I had believed what the chief editor of the 1924 edition had told G.Berg­sträßer, that he had recon­structed the spelling by tran­scrib­ing the text that he knew by heart according to the Andalu­sian manuals on the writing of the qurʾān by Abū ʿAmr ʿUṯmān ibn Saʿīd ad-Dānī and his pupil Abū Daʾūd Sulaiman Ibn Naǧāḥ, following Ibn Naǧāḥ, when he disagreed with his teacher.
Later I discovered that the editors of the Medina muṣḥaf written by ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā, wrote that they followed "mostly" Ibn Naǧāḥ, which means ‒ if the 10% of the text that I com­pared are re­presen­ta­tive ‒ in 95% of cases.
And that they (i.e. al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddad al-Mālikī) some­times follow neither Abū ʿAmr nor Abū Daʾūd (maybe Abu'l Hasan ʿAlī bin Muḥammad al-Murādi al-Andalusī al-Balansī [d. 546 h] in al-Munṣif or Abū'l Qāsim ibn Firruh ibn Ḫalaf ibn Aḥmad al-Ruʿaynī aš-Šāṭibī (أبو القاسم بن فره بن خلف بن أحمد الرعيني الشاطبي ) [d. 590 h] in al-ʿAqīlat Atrāf al-Qaṣāʾid or in ar-Rāʾiyya الرائية
or as-Suyūtī's [d.849 h] Itqān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān 1999
2019

Then I learnt that some editions follow Mawrid al-Ẓamʾān by al-Kharrāz, which is based on both ad-Dānī and Ibn Naǧāḥ;
and that Gizeh 1924 just follows the most common Moroccan rasm,
the Libyan muṣḥaf al-jamāhīriya follows always ad-Dānī,
and Tāj Company mostly ad-Dānī, because the Indian rasm authority, al-Ārkātī follows ad-Dānī,
that Indonesia had copied several Ottoman and Indian (notably pre-Tāj from Bombay) maṣāḥif, that 1983/4 the government committee (Lajnah Pentashihan Mushaf al-Qurʾan established in 1957) published a standard to bring them together (e.g. introducing an "Indian" sign for /ū/ missing in Turkish and Persian manuscripts), reducing the pause signs to seven, imposing one system of verse numbering (Kūfī with 6236 verses)
that the Committee changed the standard after 19 years ‒ not secretly but in the open AND stating which authority they follow in each case.
September 2018 a list with 186 words to be written differently again was published.
In 171 cases a straight fatḥa will stand, where none was before, but there are 11 cases were it is the other way around.
Three cases concern raʾā = he saw. 1983 it was written as in Bombay and in Bahrije (the two prints reprinted in Indonesia): راٰ In 2002 the scholars changed it to رأى like in Modern Standard Arabic, in 2018 they switched to the African way of writing: رءا
In Tunis there are lots of editions following the transmission of Qālūn, some following the normal Maghrebian rasm, other al-Kharrāz, some in the writing style of ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā, others a "mild" form of Maghribī (not as difficult to read as Fāsī), none copying the Libyan (ad-Dānī) rasm, since that book is readily available.
So I discovered that one must keep the different dimensions apart:
not assuming that there are fixed/necessary links between rasm, reading/trans­mission, verse counting, names of Sura, liturgical divisions, calligraphic style, page layout (like: each Juz must start on top of a right page, or: verses may not straddle pages {or very rarely} ...)

Yes, the 1924 KFE brought several innovations:
letters are on a baseline, few ligatures, space between words, numbers after each verse (not just an end-of-verse-marker, and signs every fifth verse),
a streamlined system of pause signs;
the reading helps were largely Maghrebian, but a common sign for vowelless and for unpronounced became differen­tiated.
Strangely most orientalists still assume that the "Cairo/Azhar committee" came up with lots of innovations.
There were some improvements (streamlined Sajawandi pause signs, differentiated sukun signs for vowellessness vs. unpronouncedness), but the main revolution happened with the 1308/1890 al-Muḫallalātī muṣḥaf:
a difficient rasm,
the Maġribi way for writing long vowels:
having always two signs: a vowel sign + ḥarf al-madd
writing if necessary a small (or red) ḥarf al-madd.
Yes, the Iranian Center for Printing and Publication of Qurʾān, came up with a new (simplified) rasm
and at the same time a new (simple) system of vowel signs, pause signs and so on.
One must keep these aspects apart. There are Iranian prints with the new rasm, with the tradi­tional signs, there are prints with the calligraphy of ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā, but with a different rasm from the Medina print.
Most prints published by the Center do not differen­tiate between iẓhār vs. idġām, of nūn sākin (esp. tanwīn), but some do!
Most Iranian prints do not show assi­mila­tion that go further than in MSA, but some do.
The Damascus publisher Dar al-Maʿrifa prints Medinese transmissions (Qālūn, Azraq, Isbahani) with Kufian verse numbers ‒ to make it easier to compare.
Instead of talking of "la version du Maghreb" one should say "the trans­mission of Warsh", "the verse numbering of Medina II," "the rasm of Ibn Naǧāḥ" or "Q52 rasm aka KFC rasm" (different at two places from Q52) or "the rasm of Muṣḥaf Qaṭar" (different at one place from ʿUṬ/KFC); in other cases of "an elaborated Saǧā­wandī pause system with 15 signs" or a "simplified Saǧā­wandī pause system with five signs."
True, that is longer, but assuming that these aspects go toghether, is wrong.
Publishers are free to come up with new devices.
Almost 50 years ago the Iranian Center for Printing and Publica­tion of Quran intro­duced three new signs: small fatḥa, small ḍamma, small kasra where in old Ottoman and Safavid maṣāḥif we find red fatḥa/ḍamma/kasra (just waṣl-sign in Q24).
Ten years later the Center introduced grey for silent letters (later yet, blue or red instead of grey). When it had become cheap and simple to print a second colour they did not go back on their earlier invention: red letters were un­pronounc­ed/silent and the fatḥa at the beginning of a word normally starting with hamzatu l-waṣl after a pause, hence spoken as hamzatu l-qaṭʿ stayed small and black.
Yes, there are traditions of qurʾān writing, some aspects normally come together, but not necessarily.
Note:
The publishers do not change the (oral) text of the qurʾān, they just try to make it easier to read or to pronounce it correctly.