Thank you for the interest. I just place the UTFT library in ~/.platformio/lib directory. As I said the demo works fine like that. It is just that printNumF() gives garbage.
The other thing is that it is strange for there to be a UTFT_SdRaw lib in platformio without the UTFT lib it relies on.
I have had a reply from gnulabis in which he points out that the esp8266 function that should do the conversion is empty. I have edited the HW_ESP8266.h file, in my copy of UTFT-ESP8266 from gnulabis, to include the dtostrf() function to do the conversion, like this: