No Standard ‒ Main Points

there is no standard copy of the qurʾān.
There are 14 readings (seven recognized by all, three more, and four (or five) of contested status).
there are 14 canonical transmissions (riwājāt) (two of each of the Seven),
each of which has ways/paths (ṭuruq) and versions/faces (wuǧuh).

All of this is not our main interest, because
‒ except in the greater Maghrib, Sudan, Somalia and Yaman and among the Bohras ‒
rank and file Muslims read only one riwāja: Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim.

The second big dif­ference between copies of the qurʾān that does not inter­est us here, is the rasm: there are three main rasm au­tho­ri­ties to follow: ad-Dānī, Ibn Naǧāḥ and al-Ār­kātī

As far as I know most editions follow a mix of diverent authorities ‒ the Lybian Qālūn Edition fol­low­ing ad-Dānī being an ex­ception. Authorities in Iran and Indo­ne­sia publish lists where they follow whom, others just have their (secret) way.

What interests me is
the spelling and
the layout.
Other points are important, like the
pauses and
the divisions (juz, ḥizb, para, manzil, niṣf ...),
but I do not know enough to post about them.

There are two main spellings: western and eastern
IPak is THE eastern spelling;
Ottoman, Persian, Turk, Tartar, NeoIran, Indonesian are eastern sub-spellings.
G24 and Q52 are realisation of the western spelling, Mag being their "mother".

The main difference between West and East is the writing of long vowel.

While in the East the (short) signs are turned to make them long,

in the West a leng­then­ing vowel has to follow: either one that is part of the rasm or a small sub­stitute.










G24/Q52 differentiate between /a/ and /ā/, but not between /i/ and /ī/ when there is a yāʾ in the text.
IPak always makes the difference.
(just to make clear: in the middle column, in /hāḏā/ the dagger in IPak is a vowel sign, in Mag it is a small letter leng­thening the sign before it ‒ al­though they look the same, they are dif­ferent things)

Mag, G24, Q52 have three kinds of tanwin, Bombay instead has izhar nun, IPak, Osm ... have nothing

Another differences lies in as­simila­tion: both Mag and IPak do mark assimi­la­tion, Osm, Turk, Pers, NIran do not.

While IPak has three different madd signs, Mag/G24/Q52 have only one.

The main feature of page layout is the number of lines per page.
Leaving the layout with a page for a thirtieth or sixtieth on the side
there are layouts with 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 lines per page,
the berkenar with 604 pages of 15 lines being the most common
  (due to Hafiz Osman and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha).

My motivation was anger about old German orientalists calling the King Fuʾād Edition "the Standard Edition";
later I came across young orientalist calling it "CE" / "the Cairo Edition",
althought there are more than a thousand maṣāḥif printed in Cairo,
more than a hundred conceived in Cairo,
so calling one of these the "CE" is madness, ignorance, carelessness.
The only new thing about the KFE: it is type set, but offset printed;
its text is not new, but a switch.
It turns out that there are different KFEs, two 27 cm high ones printed 1924 and 1925 in the Survey of Egypt in Giza, and from 1952 on, in the press of Dar al-Kutub in Gamāmīz,
and 20 cm high oneS printed in Būlāq;
there is one written by Muḥam­mad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusai­nī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥad­dād
and one revised under the guidance of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Maṣrī aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ.
The text of 1924 is history,
the text of 1952 survives in the "Shamarly" written by Muḥammad Saʿd Ibrāhīm al-Ḥaddād
and in the Ḥafṣ 604 page maṣāḥif written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha.
The Amīriyya itself printed the text of 1952 in the large KFE printed in Gamāmīz
and the Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf (with four in-between-pause-signs merged into one) printed in Būlāq;
but their small kfes have the '24 text with a few '52 changes ‒ a strange mix that stayed largely unnoticed.

Just as there are seven different KFE/kfe, there are four different UTs:
UT0 1399‒1404 with (up to) five mistakes, basically KFE II, without after­word ‒ printed in Damascus, Istanbul, Tehran
UT1 1405‒1421 without mistakes, with a dagger under hamza in 2:72, and a small sīn under ṣād elimi­nated in 8:22 ("photo­shopded") ‒ first with the 1924 after­word, later with "mostly" added ‒ printed in Madina and many places
UT2 1422‒'38 without space between words and no lead­ing bet­ween lines (written by UT in Madina) ‒ and printed in Madina
UT3 since '38 without headers at the bottom of pages, with­out end if aya at the beginn­ing of lines, with cor­rected sequen­tial fathatan ‒ rearranged and printed in Madina

When you compare UT2 (above) with UT3 you see:
they are very similar;
but while there are small differences between the same words in UT2
the same word in UT3 is identical.

Another difference: in UT2 sometimes there is zero space between words;
that does not occur in UT3.

­‒

Bombay

1358/1959

1299/1880

Iran (chronologically)

after the page with links to posts about Indian maṣāḥif, here about Iran:
1829
1830
1832
1846
1850(the last in that post)
1850
1886

1940 (second in the post)
1957 +'67
1973
2004 (second part of the post)
Persian calligraphy

UT but not UT

I do not believe what is said or written.
I prefer to look for myself.
Here a page by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha OR they say:
wa-nāla šarafa kitāba­tihi al-ḫaṭāṭ ʿuṯmānu ṭāha suggest­ing that he wrote it,
but it is made with a open type font:

To remind you: UT0 is a true render­ing of KFE II on 604 ber­kenar pages with five minor mis­takes.

the two roundels in the sura title box are UT's invention, the in­forma­tion is in the KFE but not in separate roundels,
Madina elimina­tes them, the Syrian Auqāf Ministry Muṣ­ḥaf of about 2016 has them different­ly.
In 2:72, Madina and the Syrian ministry put the hamza on a dagger: a inven­tion in a Ḥafṣ muṣā­ḥaf ‒ neither in KFE nor in UT0 (or added by hand).
In the last (three) line(s): two of the mis­takes:
the Auqaf ministry has the fatha, in one of my UT0 copies the owner has added it;
the Auqaf ministry muṣ­ḥaf has the dagger, one of my copies has UT's alif;
the other early print has a dagger, but one sees the space where the alif was in UT's hand­written original (اصله)
So the modern Syrian print it neither UT0, nor UT1 (the first Madina ver­sion), but a muṣ­ḥaf set in UT's hand­writing on a com­puter.

Both the Ǧaʿfar Bey type of the Amīriyya and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha's writing are poor in stacked liga­tures, and never place harakāt before or after its letter. I call that "base­line oriented"; it is Nasḫ.
Hence some of the Egyptians who saw the muṣḥaf thought they had pictures of handwritten pages in their hands.
Therefore the phrase "he (al-Ḥusainī) wrote the book" was changed into "... wrote the model (اصله) of the book in his writing".

Almost seventy years later the expert translator and commentator Adel Theodor Khoury wrote in each of his eight volume commentary (1990-2001) that it included

den arabischen Original­text der offiziellen Ausgabe des Korans in der schönen osmani­schen Hand­schrift (emphasis added)
the original text in the official edition of the qurʾān in its beauti­ful Ottoman hand­writing

This is as grotesque as taking the set pages of the Syrian Auqāf Ministry muṣḥaf for hand­written.
Here a demonstration of its technical character:

And there UT edition that claim not to be by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha,
because Šiʿites so much abhor the three usur­pator khalifs, that they can bear that an Abu Bakr, ʿUmār or ʿUṯmān dis something positive

­‒

India (chronologically)

As I have not posted about Indian maṣāḥif chronologically, here are some links (and low quality images):
1829 with Persian
1831 Calcutta, type, pleasing
1837 type
1840 lithograpgy

Agra 1264/1847

1850 Lucknow
1286/1852 Delhi, Sahāran­pūrī's Aḥmadi Press see below

Delhi 1281/1864

1866 two lithographies
1867 Lucknow
1868 cheap bestseller
1869 three (twice Bombay)
1870 three

Kanipur 1287/1870

Kanipur 1289/1872 ↑

Ludhiana 1296/1878 →

1875 Bombay

1876 Bareilly

1878 Lucknow


1879 translation by Shah ‘Abd al-Wahhāb Rafi ad-Din ad-Dihlawī

1883 (and 2000) Cochin

Allahbad 1887

1888 Dilhi Persian, Urdu

Agra 1895

Kanpur 1897

Lukhnau 1363/1905

Ludhiana 1364/1907

today (in German)
Taj company Ltd.
Indian spelling (in German)
Bombay spelling
izhar nūn in Bombay prints
Bombאy prints for the Dutch Indies
for Central Asia
Indian pause signs (German)
tajwid ‒ many from Lahore

The title of the 1852 print was: al-kitāb allaḏī qāla allāh taʿAlA fī waṣihī laʾin iǧtamaǧat ...

While the base text is Ḥafṣ it has information in other vowels in the inner margin and different rasm on the outer margins.

reprint

leaving the meaning partial reprint / offprint aside
"reprint" has two distinct meanings:
1. a reissue of a printed work using the same type, plates, etc, as the original
a new printing that is identical to an original; a reimpression.
a facsimile, a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print
that is as true to the original source as possible.
a new impression, without alteration, of a book or other printed work.

2. a reproduction in print of matter already printed, a new impression, with minor alterations.

We have seen that there are no reprints in the strict sense of the King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 at all.
The editions 1925 to 1929 are different in size and (slightly) in content.
The large KFE II of 1952 has the same size but has almost a thousand changes in content (but not those of 1925 to '29).
The small kfe II after 1952 are made with the 1925 plates but with about a hundred changes introduced in 1952. ‒ I'd say: their text is with­out value, because it is a mix of two different editions, the one made by al-Husainī al-Ḥaddād and the one made under the auspicies of aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ.

Now, let's have a look as the Hyderabad edition of 1938.
It is a double reprint in the second meaning:
double, because of the English trans­lation from 1930 by M.M. Pickthall, and the 1924 Amiriyya print, the KFE I.
But there are imp­rovements in both part:
The English text has four minor changes in verse numbering:

with a kind of justification in English and Urdu

The Arab text is page and line identical with KFE I,
but has a technical dis­ad­vant­age (kasra being below the letters instead being inte­grated into the des­cen­ders like م)





kasra, kasratan, sequential kasratan, kasratan+mīm, and other signs below the base line (like sīn)











and minor improvement to make it acceptable to Indian Muslims.

/ʾallah/ with (short) kasra is changed into /ʾallāh/ with a (long) dagger;
ruquʿāt are added.

While there was no second impression in Hyderabad, in 1976, the year of a huge The World of Islam Festival in London, George Allen & Unwin made a reprint: with the unchanged original and an added foreword

this was reprinted in 1979, and in 1980 for Sharjah.

In the 1970s there were "reprints" in the second meaning (with slight changes) in Bairut:
Dar al-Kitab al-Lubnāni/al-Maṣrī printed (in one volume on Bible paper, just as in London) bilingual editions (with Pickthall's English trans­lation, and with the French one by Denise Masson) for the Lybian World Islamic Call Society.
In these "reprints" some mis­takes in the 1924 text mentioned in KFE II 1952 are changed: like (/ka­limat, qāʾim/ ...)

whether kasra draws the ham­za sign below the base­line has no­thing to do with the rasm, it is a con­ven­tion, but it must be the same in all places. While both the Maġ­rib and India have hamza near kasra, Otto­mans, Turks and Per­sians have it above the base­line.

and most of the time (some were forgotten) when a sura ends with tan­wīn it is changed to tanwīm
because in 1924 it was assumed that after a sura the next one is recited without a fresh basmala. Since 1952 a basmala is assumed, hence in­stead of /an, un, in/ now: /am, um, im/.

I will end with a horrific discovery for a German.
In the English language there is a proper term for our "Flachdruck":
pla·nog·ra·phy (plə-nŏg′rə-fē, plā-) n.
A process for printing from a smooth surface, as litho­graphy or offset.
And there is a wrong one:
li·thog·ra·phy (lĭ-thŏg′rə-fē) n.
A printing process in which the image to be printed is rendered on a flat surface, as on sheet zinc or aluminum, and treated to retain ink while the non­image areas are treated to repel ink.

This is just wrong: "lithos" meaning "stone", not "zinc", nor "aluminum"
The same mistake differently put:
lithography
1. the art or process of producing an image on a flat, specially prepared stone, treating the items to be printed with a greasy substance to which ink adheres, and of taking impressions from this on paper.
2. a similar process in which the stone is replaced by a zinc or aluminum plate, often provided with a photo­sensitive surface for reproduc­ing an image photo­graphical­ly.

While the first definition is fine, the second is stupidly wrong. Why use a word with "stone" in it   for a process with a metall plate, although there are proper terms for the process?
Since the language has the specific "offset" and the general "planography", there is no need to use "lithography" for printing with metall plates.

As much as I am happy with this 1980 reprint for Sharjah informing us of the printer, and the fact that it is an un­changed reproduc­tion, I am horrified by the use of "lithography" for "offset" (knowing that it is not a personal idiocracy).
thanks to Muhammad I. Hozien for providing this (and other images) from his huge collec­tions of maṣā­ḥif.
    ‒
­‒

Beauty / Readabiliy

Muṣḥaf Muscat (top) and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (bottom) look better than the KFE (middle),
but are not always easier to read.

The main problem I see in the Amīriyya set KFE after rāʾ/zai and waw, and before kaf within words. Often (not always) there is too big a space within words.