Converting ASCII smilies into files

[Etan Reisner]

I don't believe you will have any luck finding a tool to do anything of
this sort. This is absolutely not how the existing themes were created.
You seem to have misunderstood what the theme files do. The text file in
the theme is the mapping from a textual representation of the smiley to
the image that should be displayed in its place. pidgin uses the contents
of this file to look up the icon to display for incoming and outgoing
text.

To create a smiley theme you need both the text representations you want
smiley-ified and icons you want to be displayed for those text
representations and then you craete the theme file which maps between
them. That's it. You then tell pidgin which theme to use and pidgin will
use the images in place of the correct text versions. Notably you can tell
pidgin to replace just about any text with any icon you want the icon
doesn't have to have anything to do with what the text actually is (as
long as you know what the mapping is).

    -Etan