no Standard

Many think that the Ḥafṣ version written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha and dis­tributed by the Saʿūdīs is the standard, because more such copies exist than others.
This is a misconception:
Turks who get one during the haǧǧ do not open it, give it away or put in a vitrine,
West Africans get a Warš copy written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha,
Indians and most Asians (even Iranians) get a slightly improved copy of the Indo-Pakistani standard, known as the Taj Company Ltd. Standard
((the Saʿūdīs took the 611 page muṣḥaf ‒ earlier reprinted e.g. in Kašgār ‒ but paid attention that the standing fatḥa never precedes alif for /ʾā/ [not /āʾ/!]))

Maybe that the Saʿūdī copy according to the Egyptian govern­ment print of 1952 is the most printed, it is definitely not the most bought.
Muslims buy many more copies of the Indo-Pak version.
For a simple reason: there are five times as many Muslims hailing from the Indian sub­continent, from Indonesia and parts of Central Asia under Indian influence than Muslims from Egypt and the Arab Middle East.
But isn't the Egyptian text better?
First it is the Maghrebian rasm, with Maghrebian tanwīn signs,
with Maghrebian sukūn on (some) unpronounced letters and Indian ǧazm on un­vowelled letters,
with Egyptian ǧuz-/ḥizb-divisions, with a stream­lined Indian system of pause signs.
Second,
and more important:
The new "Arab" and the older "Indian" standard are of equal quality.
The Turkish is not as good because it notes /ā/ and /ī/ but not /ū/ when there is no ḥarf al-madd in the rasm and it ignores assimila­tion.
The Libyan is better because their rasm follows ONE authority and not a mix.

To make a good muṣḥaf, isn't easy because
the text, the sense, the words and the gramma­tical structure have to be right,
the sound, the pronunciation, at-taǧwīd have to be right
but pronunciation changes slightly depending on where one pauses,
so the little signs around the rasm have to take different pauses into account,
and they must indicate the grammatical structure even at places
where the case endings are never pronounced.
Turkish and Iranian standards are not as good as Arab and Indian,
because they do ignore assimilation.
But the Egyptian/Saʿūdī standard is better than the Indian, is it not?
It is not.
Let's look at tanwīn:
Tanwīn is a short vowel /a,i,u/ plus a unvowelled nūn (fatḥa/kasra/ḍamma + nūn sākin)
So the pronunciation rule for tanwīn is the rule for nūn sākin:
("dan" is Malay for "and", "contoh" for "example")
Depending on the following letter EIGHT things happen to unvowelled nūn:
1.) fully pronounced, iẓhār إظهار before the letter h, ḥ, ḫ, ʾ, ʿ, ġ
8.) pronounced as mīm iqlāb يقلاب
4.) idġām kāmil bi-la-ġunna before rāʾ and lām:
the nūn is completely assimilated to the following letter, resulting in /rr/ resp. /ll/
3.) idġām kāmil bi-ġunna complete assimi­lation with nasaliza­tion before nūn and mīm
2.) idġām nāqiṣ bi-ġunna incomplete assimi­lation with nasali­zation before the glides yāʾ and wau
5.) iḫfāʾ suġra small reduction, not full articu­lated before k, q
6.) iḫfāʾ wusṭa medium reduction, reduced articu­lated before z, ḍ, ẓ, ḏ, ṯ, ṣ, s, š, ǧ, f
7.) iḫfāʾ kubra big reduction, weakly articu­lated before d, t, ṭ

In India, Indonesia, Turkey, Iran there is only one tanwīn sign for each of the three short vowels,
which is fine: the next letter makes clear, how the nūn has to be pro­nounced.
In Bombay (and other places in India and earlier in Indonesia) a small nūn is added after the tanwīn to stress iẓhār.
In Arabia there are not EIGHT different tanwīn signs, but three,
which does not really help: One still has to look to the next letter.
AND: For iqlāb there is no tanwīn sign encoded in the Unicode,
which leads to utter confusion:
In the digital data stream of the qurʾān tanwīn iqlāb is not encoded as tan­wīn. but as simple vowel sign!
So which is better?
Which should serve as Standard?

There are many sites in the web devoted to Islamic manu­scripts,
but only one devoted to both manuscripts and prints, Ali Akbar's Indonesian/Malay archipelago blog.
He gave me images from Indonesian "Bombay prints", always page 3, verses 5,6 of al-baqara:


The third spot I highlighted is an iqlāb mīm, common in all maṣāḥif, the first two iẓhār nūn, very rare ‒ why?