.NFO File Format

Introduction

An NFO file, short for “info”, is a text file released alongside software or media by the groups of the warez scene and the demoscene. It names the release and the group, and gives credits and notes on installing it. The Humble Guys, a PC group, are credited with starting the practice in 1990, in place of the usual README.TXT. NFO files are known for their large logos drawn in text characters.

Two other kinds of file share the extension and are XML rather than this kind of text. Kodi and other media library programs store details of films and programmes in .nfo files, and the Windows System Information tool saves its reports as .nfo.

Structure

An NFO has no fixed layout and no header. It is plain text, in columns meant for a fixed-width display of about 80 characters, with lines usually ended by carriage return and line feed. It is usually encoded in code page 437, the IBM PC character set, whose shaded blocks and line drawing characters make up the art. The art is drawn only with those characters: unlike ANSI art it normally has no escape codes, so it has no colour.

Because the file does not say which encoding it uses, opening one as Windows-1252 or UTF-8 turns the art into accented letters. To display it correctly, a viewer must decode it as code page 437 and use a font with no gaps between lines. Files from recent years are sometimes UTF-8.

  ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄   ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
 ███▀▀▀▀███ ███▀▀▀▀▀▀
 ███    ███ ███▄▄▄▄▄
 ███    ███ ███▀▀▀▀▀
 ▀▀▀    ▀▀▀ ▀▀▀
░▒▓█  EXAMPLE RELEASE  █▓▒░

  Supplied by ... Example Group
  Date .......... 1996-03-12
  Disks ......... 4 x 1.44 MB

  Unpack all files and run INSTALL.EXE.

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