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.

­‒

UT1 UT2 UT3

UT1 was without the mistakes (corrected in PhotoShop), plus the dagger under hanza in 2:72, without the small sīn in 88:22, and with the taʾrīf ʿUṯmān Ṭaha had copied for them.
from the 1414 print

In 1420 they insert half a sentence

Instead of claiming to follow always Abū Daʾūd as al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād had done, they said: we follow him most of the time, some­times his teacher ad-Dānī, and sometimes "other experts." So, after having scrutinize the text and found out that the claim (always Abū Daʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Naǧāḥ) was wrong, they did not adapt the text to Abū Daʾūd's Muḫtaṣar at-Tabyīn li-Haǧāʾ at-Tan­zīl, but changed the taʿrīf.

One of the changes between UT1 and UT2 occurs in 2:72.
While UT0 has just a hamza, UT1 has a dagger under the hamza, UT2 an alif-hamza.
(top: UT0, last two UT2, in between 1404 to 1417: no change: UT1 is stable).


After the King Fahd Complex had printed millions of UT1 they invited ʿUṯmān Ṭaha to Madina to write for them a Warsh muṣḥaf, then an improved Ḥafṣ ‒ and later Qālūn, an other Warsh (this tome on 604 pages), ad-Dūrī and Šuʿba.
The new script is a bit more cursive, bigger (i.e. there is less empty space between lines) and has less letter variants. On the image below middle-hāʾ has three forms on the left, only one on the right, rāʾ (and zai) have two forms on the left, one on the right, tāʾ can have the two dots verticaly on the left, not on the right, and the two forms of final mīm are equally dis­tributed on the left, while on the right the short stroke to the left predominates.
On the page bellow, the page layout differs (with two more verses on the left), but, if I am not mis­taken, that occurs only in the last ǧuz: all in all minor changes.

The change from UT2 to UT3 brought:
headlines (sura titel boxes) never come at the bottom of a page,
rather as the head of the next;
end-of-aya-numbers never come at the beginning of a line
rather at the end of the line before;
taʿrīf and Index of Suras are bigger, take more pages.

And there is a dif­ference that is con­nected to one of MY observa­tions that is missed by most "ex­perts".
I say: Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥaddād (1282/1865‒1357/ 22.1.1939) adopted many Anda­lusian/Maġ­ribī/Western things without mention­ing it in the post­script, which makes me think that he copied a Moroccon muṣḥaf.
One of the points: Ottoman Egypt, Persia, India and Nusantara have one kind of tanwīn (one an, one un, one in), but indepen­dant Egypt has three just as Morocco, but there is a problem. Ottomans did not know how sequential fathatan is written.
When one com­pares the Warš muṣḥaf and the early Ḥafṣ maṣā­ḥif by UT the sequential fathatan are different.









Because UT is not only a good scribe but also a good ob­server:
he noticed that the second fatha (the left one) is above the first in Morroco, but below in the KFE ‒ I assume that the type setter just used kasratans lifted up.

A couple of years ago Madina noticed the mis­take and asked UT to correct it, which is done in UT3:

Once alerted to this: the old fathatan (light blue background) looks wrong, the two fathas do not follow the natural way of writing from right to left.
‒ ­