from man 3 printf: Many countries use the day-month-year order. Hence, an internationalized version must be able to print the argu ments in an order specified by the format: #include <stdio.h> fprintf(stdout, format, weekday, month, day, hour, min); where format depends on locale, and may permute the argu ments. With the value "%1$s, %3$d. %2$s, %4$d:%5$.2d\n" one might obtain `Sonntag, 3. Juli, 10:02'. To be able to do things like this we need to have a printf style of declaring user/i18n/l10n strings "LyX failed to save file %1$s in %2$s dir." can be altered in po files to f.ex: "Dir %2$s is not open for writing for file %1$s" I am sure this can be useful. Lgb