The Quran was recited before it was a book, and the move from one to the other is described in the Muslim tradition as two operations with Zayd ibn Thabit at the centre of both. The first, under Abu Bakr, gathered material written on whatever had been to hand, palm stalks, thin stones, shoulder blades, scraps of parchment, together with what was held in memory, into a single set of sheets kept afterwards by Hafsa. The second, some twenty years later under Uthman, produced a standard consonantal text from those sheets, copied it, and sent the copies to the garrison cities with instructions that competing written versions be withdrawn.
Zayd was young for the first task and senior for the second, where he headed a commission whose other members were Qurashi. The tradition records a working rule for disputed passages, that the usage of Quraysh was to be preferred because the revelation had come in their speech. It also records that he did not welcome the assignment, replying that moving a mountain would have been lighter work.
The manuscript evidence and the tradition are broadly consistent about the outcome. The earliest substantial Quranic manuscripts show a stable consonantal skeleton across widely separated copies, which is what a centrally issued standard would produce, though exactly how the standardisation was carried out remains an active field.