Q:

Formatting output with printf: truncating or padding

I would like to produce the following output:
> Avril Stewart  99  54
> Sally Kinghorn 170 60
> John Young     195 120
> Yutte Schim... 250 40

As you can see, names shorter than 14 characters are padded with spaces. Names longer than 15 characters are truncated: 'Yutte Schimmelpenninck' truncates to 'Yutte Schim...'.
Here is what I have tried to achieve this (the variables $name, $height, and $weight are extracted from files, and a loop runs the printf command on each file data):
printf '%-14s -%3s -%3s\n' "$name" "$height" "$weight"
> Avril Stewart  99  54
> Sally Kinghorn 170 60
> John Young     195 120
> Yutte Schimmelpenninck 250 40

A printf one-liner is the desired solution.
What code will produce the first block of output?

A:

Before your printf command, you want to check if a name is longer than 14 characters, and if yes, truncate it and replace the last three characters with dots. This command does that:
(( ${#name} > 14 )) && name="${name:0:11}..."

It replaces name with its first eleven characters and appends ....
You also have to fix the printf format string: instead of 
'%-14s -%3s -%3s\n'

it has to be
'%-14s %-3s -%-3s\n'

or you get results such as
Avril Stewart  - 99 - 54

Maybe that was just a typo, though, as your example output didn't have the hyphens.
All in all:
$ name='Avril Stewart'; weight=99; height=54
$ (( ${#name} > 14 )) && name="${name:0:11}..."
$ printf '%-14s %-3s %-3s\n' "$name" $weight $height
Avril Stewart  99  54
$ name='Sally Kinghorn'; weight=170; height=60
$ (( ${#name} > 14 )) && name="${name:0:11}..."
$ printf '%-14s %-3s %-3s\n' "$name" $weight $height
Sally Kinghorn 170 60
$ name='Yutte Schimmelpeninck'; weight=250; height=40
$ (( ${#name} > 14 )) && name="${name:0:11}..."
$ printf '%-14s %-3s %-3s\n' "$name" $weight $height
Yutte Schim... 250 40

So if you read this from a file, for example comma separated, you'd end up with a loop like this:
while IFS=, read -r name weight height; do
    (( ${#name} > 14 )) && name="${name:0:11}..."
    printf '%-14s %-3s %-3s\n' "$name" $weight $height
done < inputFile

resulting in
Avril Stewart  99  54
Sally Kinghorn 170 60
John Young     195 120
Yutte Schim... 250 40

I don't think it's possible in a one-liner. I experimented with the ternary operator and tried something like
printf '%s\n' $(( ${#name} > 14 ? "${name:0:11}..." : "$name" ))

but the problem here is that it only works for integers, and strings expand to zero in arithmetic context.

A:

a more idiomatic awk version will be
$ awk        '{v=$1 FS $2} 
  length(v)>14{v=substr(v,1,11)"..."}
              {printf "%-15s %-3d %-3d\n",v,$3,$4}' file     

Avril Stewart  99  54 
Sally Kinghorn 170 60 
John Young     195 120
Yutte Schim... 250 40

if you remove the - sign in %-3d, numbers will be right aligned as usual, however this the format you asked for.

