CIGAL Reference Manual, Chapter 2 (Commands): FTYPE
usage: ftype fmtstring varb1 varb2 …
The FTYPE command is an alternative form of the TYPE command – the only difference being that TYPE prints its output in a standardized format, whereas with FTYPE you can format the output any way you like. To do this, the first argument to FTYPE must be a format command string (FMTSTRING), which acts as a template specifying how to display each of the remaining arguments (VARB1 - VARBn).
To do the format conversions, FTYPE calls the FORMAT function (see FORMAT(3)). For variables with many elements, FORMAT is called repeatedly until all of the data values have been printed.
For a description of the syntax of the format string, see FORMAT(3). For more information, see TYPE(2).