How is formatted printing related in any way to the internal representation of strings? printf is what you call when you want to print X in hexadecimal with at

How is formatted printing related in any way to the internal representation of strings? printf is what you call when you want to print X in hexadecimal with at least two digits, left justified on an eight-character wide field. I don't see how the sanity of whatever string representation the programming language uses is relevant here.