pwnt.be

A friend of mine—who happens to be a Mac user—wanted to use the default Pidgin emoticon theme with Adium. Being built on libpurple, I expected Adium to support the format out of the box, but I was wrong. It requires that the index file be a Mac OS X property list, which is an improvement over Pidgin’s flat files, but an abomination in terms of semantic XML.

Anyway, I came up with a quick-and-dirty converter. Obviously, since I wrote it, it’s a Perl script.

Untitled by laihiu
Some rights reserved

You can download the script for free. Run it with:

perl pidgin2adium.pl theme_path [set1 set2 …]

The theme_path is the path to the emoticon theme you’d like to convert. You’ll find it under pixmaps/pidgin/emotes/.
The optional list of sets specifies which sets you’d like to convert. The default theme, for instance, defines emoticons for all sorts of protocols, and I just wanted the default set and the one for MSN Messenger.
To sum up, for my purposes, I used the command:

perl pidgin2adium.pl "C:\Program Files\Pidgin\pixmaps\pidgin\emotes\default" default MSN

The script creates a zip file named after the theme (in my case Default.zip) in the working directory. If no zip file was created, the script will have died with an error. No output means everything was hunky dory.