By definition, ':', '\t', '\r' and '\n' are always one character large (but may be multiple bytes on a compiler running wide character sets). That is a known.

But your assumptions about the produced number of characters when printing numbers is based on an incorrect assumption.

%4d is four characters large if and only if the value to print can fit in four characters. The value -1000 requires five characters. The value 12345 also requires five characters. printf() will not throw away extra characters to produce a lie. It will extend the field width and emit every required character!

That is why you should never (N.E.V.E.R.) manually "count" the number of produced characters. In this case, you may write a broken record to a flash file system, or send a broken packet on a communication board. But this world is full of programs with dangerous buffer-overflow vulnerabilities, costing many millions of dollars every hour, just because people have assumed that they knew the size of the output from the *printf() family of functions.