Extract text from NIT files
To convert your NIT file to another format, you need ArcGIS or other GIS software.
To convert other file formats to the "Geospatial Index File" file type, you need software like ArcGIS or a similar tool.
The .nit extension serves two primary, yet distinct, roles in the geospatial and engineering worlds.
First, it is frequently identified as a National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) file. While standard extensions are ntf or nitf, legacy systems occasionally use .nit. These are military-grade raster images containing metadata, predominantly used by defense agencies like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. They are notoriously heavy and difficult to open without specialized GIS software like ArcGIS Pro or QGIS. For general viewing or web use, these must be converted to GeoTIFF, JPG, or PDF to strip away the complex georeferencing headers that block standard image viewers.
Second, in the realm of legacy GIS, a .nit file acts as an ArcInfo Item Index file. These are not standalone documents but internal components of an ArcInfo Coverage (a folder-based data structure). Trying to open this file in isolation is a common friction point; it contains no viewable map data on its own, only indexing pointers for the database. To make this data usable, you typically need to convert the entire coverage folder into a modern Shapefile (.SHP) or GeoJSON format using conversion tools. Additionally, users of Nemetschek Allplan may encounter .nit files used for CAD data transfer, which are similarly proprietary and locked to that specific ecosystem.
Convert.Guru analyzes your NIT file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted NTS, SBX, CPG, GDBTABLE and LUX files.
If you want to convert NIT file to LUX, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT or DB, you can use ArcGIS or similar software from the "Geospatial Data Indexing" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to NIT, try ArcGIS or another comparable tool in the "Geospatial Data Indexing" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our NIT converter.