JDK for Solaris Developer's Guide

Formatter

An interpreter for printf-style format strings, the Formatter class provides support for layout justification and alignment, common formats for numeric, string, and date/time data, and locale-specific output. Common Java types such as byte, java.math.BigDecimal , and java.util.Calendar are supported. Limited formatting customization for arbitrary user types is provided through the java.util.Formattable interface.

Refer to the documentation at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Formatter.html.