When you download a software these days, they come just with the software binary and perhaps a readme file. But back in the day, there was a standard practice of supplying a DIZ and NFO file along with the software package – all packed together inside a ZIP archive.
As you can probably guess, the NFO file is for giving some information about what the software is about. The DIZ file (usually FILE_ID.DIZ) describes whats inside the ZIP file – basically giving you a list of all the contents and brief description of the files inside the archive.
These files are traditionally written using ASCII characters often in a decorative fancy design. Since these are plain text files, your viewer app must have the proper text font face and font size so that you can view and read these files as they were intended to.
NFOPad is a freeware tool that can be used not only for viewing the NFO, DIZ and TXT files, but also for creating or editing them. It displays these files using special fonts and colors that makes it very pleasant for you to read them. For displaying NFO files correctly it has in-build ASCII fonts.
While it looks like a plain text editor just like Notepad, it comes with special features such as using different background color for different type of files, using arrow keys for direct scrolling, and using alpha blend to add transparency to NFOPad. It can detect URLs and email addresses inside the NFO, DIZ or TXT files. You can click on these hyperlinks to open them in your default web browser.
NFOPad is a small, fast and portable text editor that can create, edit and view NFO, DIZ and TXT files. It can integrate with Windows File Explorer so that you can open NFO and DIZ files just by double-clicking on them.
You can download NFOPad from http://truehumandesign.se/.