Kate confusion with NFO encoding

Support Software & Applications
1

When I open an NFO file, it opens with Kate. That’s nice. However, with Kate 25.04.0-1 I cannot see any option to set NFO files to open with encoding CP437 (or IBM437) for correct text display on NFO files.

From a terminal, both of these lines work:

kate --encoding cp437 NFO.nfo
kate --encoding ibm437 NFO.nfo

Looking at Kate’s Settings, under the ‘Open/Save’ tab is another tab - Modes & Filetypes.

In there, we create a New filetype, but there appears to be no field to specify the encoding for this filetype… a field referenced in several searches.

I just had a go with creating a new file:

~/.local/share/org.kde.syntax-highlighting/syntax/nfo.xml

Summary 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<language name="NFO" version="1.0" kateversion="5.0" section="Other"
          extensions="*.nfo" mimetype="text/x-nfo" priority="1">
  <metadata>
    <property name="encoding">CP437</property>
  </metadata>
  <highlighting>
    <contexts>
      <context name="Normal" attribute="Normal Text" lineEndContext="#stay"></context>
    </contexts>
  </highlighting>
</language>

It just seems a real mess. The Manjaro ‘extra’ has a basic GTK4 viewer which similarly fails, and has no settings for encoding.

I’m tired to keep looking at this - and if I open the file in Kate it’s also no simple task (i.e. you can’t just search and find, and can’t find it by clicking…).

2

If you don’t need to edit the files, you might get away with adding the contents to an HTML file. A long time ago, I wrote a Python 2 script to create HTML files from .srr data. Haven’t used it in 10 years, but the end result was something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-US">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>something</title>
        <style type="text/css"> 
            pre { font-family: "DejaVu Sans Mono", monospace; font-size: 10px; line-height: 10px; }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
<pre>
<!-- stuff here -->
</pre>
    </body>
</html>

Using Python you can assemble the various things and get something similar to what those nzb sites can show you. That’s where I got the idea.

3

Off topic;
You must have quickly converted it from HTML(4) 10 years ago, as type isn’t required with HTML5. :slight_smile:

4

You can add a new association:

Screenshot_20250503_010918
Screenshot_20250503_010918942×657 57 KB

Screenshot_20250503_011244
Screenshot_20250503_011244523×564 45.3 KB

But I think your problem needs to be reported as bug to see how devs would respond.

1 Like
5

I think so, nfo already opens with Kate - but I don’t want to set Kate to launch always with CP437… only NFO.

However, not all NFO files fit the bill, so instead I wrote a script so I can pop up F4 terminal and type ‘nfo’ for kate -n --encoding ibm437 instead.

Thanks, I think it’s a regression in Kate’s settings.

6

Yep, what I said, haven’t used in ten years, so…