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, al-Ḫarrāz, and al-Ār­kātī

As far as I know most editions follow a mix of diverent authorities ‒ the Lybian Qālūn Edition (muṣḥaf al-jamāhīriya, 1987, second ed. 1989, Libyan after the death of the prophet 1399) 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

Maybe the most remarkable difference are the initial alif: the Africa they have ḥamza-sign or a waṣl-sign. In Asia a voyell-sign includes ḥamza, absence of all sign signifies "mute" or waṣl.

Because letters without any sign the four yāʾs in the three lines standing for ī need a sukūn not to be ignored.
all in all: a large part of the letters have a different sign in Africa and Asia.

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 nine to twenty 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, 27 cm high ones printed 1924, 1925, 1952, 1953 in the Survey of Egypt in Giza, later 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 the 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 1438 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.

­‒

... and it was never reprinted. And hardly any Egyptian bought it.

It sold so badly that five year later Gotthelf Berg­sträßer still could buy copies of the first print both for him­self and for the Bavarian National Library.
Strange that the experts write again and again of THE King Fuʾād Edition,
al­though there are many, differ­ent ones ‒ differ­ent not only in size and bind­ing, but in content.
The first one ‒ lets called it KFE I was printed in Giza because only the Egyp­tian Survey could make offset prints ‒ they had expe­rience in the tech­nique because they pro­duced colour maps.
The second one ‒ KFE Ib ‒ was produced in Būlāq, since the Govern­ment Press had aquired offset presses.

Like KFE I ...

... kfe Ib was stamped after bind­ing because the year of pub­lica­tion giv­ing in the book could not be met, so a stamp indi­cat­ing the next year was put on the bound copy.

There are changes on two pages ‒ both times: right the Giza print, left the first Būlāq print:

At least as important as seals/stamps instead of signa­tures is an added word.

Because there were no gaps between sorts as was typical in Būlāq prints, readers had assumed hand­written pages. The word "model" made clear that al-Ḥusai­nī al-Ḥaddād al-Mālikī had "only" written a copy for the type setters.
In the third edition ‒ kfe Ic ‒ one more page was changed: the first page afer the qurʾānic text:

In the fourth edition ‒ kfe Id ‒ one more page was changed, the only change IN the qurʾānic text before 1952 (in the first line a (silent) nūn was added):

Sorry, here the Gizeh print is on the left.
Note, that the the second edition, printed in Bulaq is smaller, but largely due to smaller margins.
After 1952, for many years there will be two editions:
‒ a bigger one with seven pages on differences between the edition of 1924/5 and the present one (starting 1952) and with all these changes (almost a thousand) being implemented
‒ a smaller one without this information ‒ and with only a small part of the changes made (on the plate of kfe Ib) .

Note that the fourth edition is not printed in Gīza (as the fist), not in Būlāq (as the second), but "in Miṣr" ‒ later yet it will be "in al-Qāhira".
Let's resume:
all KFEs were Amīriyya editions,
the first one was printed 1924 in Giza
from 1925 to 1972 they were printed in Būlāq
but a 1961 print was made in Darb al-Gamāmīz
whether by a private printer or a second factory of the press, I do not know,
from 1972 to 1975 print was in Imbāba.
All KFEs have 827 pages of qurʾānic text with 12 lines
+ 24 (or 22) pagi­nated back­matter pages + four unpagi­nated pages for the tables of content.
(until 1952: 24 pages, after the revolu­tion: with­out the leaf mention­ing King Fuʾād)
None of the KFEs has a title page;
they are all hard­cover and octavo size (20x28 cm the big one, 17x22 cm the small one ‒ the difference is more in the margin than in the text itself)

All KFE-like editions by commer­cial Egyptian presses and forgein editions (except the Frommann edition) do have title pages, most of them have one con­tinuous pagination.
There was one miniature reprint of KFE I and at least two pri­vate editions + the 1955 Peking reprint; of KFE II there were many re-editions, many re­arranged with 14 or 15 (often longer) lines ‒ in many sizes, on thinner paper and with different covers ‒ from Bairut to Tasch­kent.
In Egypt all the time, editions with 522, 525 (later 604) pages of qurʾānic text were more popular.
For the 15 lines, 525 page, type set Amīriyya print (Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf) follow the link.
The changes of the second, third and fourth edition did not survive the big change of 1952, which had about 900 changes, but reverted in things just mentioned ("dedication", aṣl, extra nūn in allan) to the first print.
Many private and foreign reprints (and later ʿUṯmān Ṭaha) keep the silent nūn.

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 ‒ 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.