Screenmovie for beginners

[maxbrandes]

Dear Romain,

Hope you are doing good. I like your project about animated stickers for signal. I wanted to try my own animated sticker set, but are not that good with python and programming language.

I tried to get your script running on my Mac with Terminal. I downloaded and installed Python 3 and guess managed to install your script as well. But then, I don’t know what to do.

Would you be so kind and send me a screen movie for me as a noob of how to create now a sticker set, like step by step? I am happy to share my results as well.

Thanks!

[romainricard]

Hey @maxbrandes ! A screencapture is not always a good solution. I have a specific configuration, and the way I work won't suit everybody. Here's what I can tell that will help everybody, whatever their configuration is:

You'll need Python 3, and pip. Follow the installation instructions in the README to install signalstickers-client. Note that this is a library, not a script. Then, you can get the upload example file and add your stickers. I've added the example files with more comments in the folder examples. Set your Signal credentials according to the README, and run the script with Python (usually something like python3 monscript.py).

This is standard Python procedure, and any documentation you find about running a script, installing a library with pip, etc. on your specific platform, with your specific configuration, should suits you. On a side note, I encourage you to use this kind of projects, with relatively easy APIs, to progress in Python! The inner working of this library is complex, but the high-level usage is not so hard.

I've also added details about my process here. Cheers!

[maxbrandes]

Thank you very much, guess that will help. Will try it today. Two more things.

• You say "Add the stickers here". Do I have to put them into a folder, as I cannot drag/drop them into the file, right? And which path is the script then refering to?

• How do I cope with: SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xf0' in file ./test.py on line 22, but no encoding declared;

Merci!

[romainricard]

Yes, you have to save all your GIF files in a folder, and give the path of each file. I don't think that you can drag and drop them.

For the encoding problem, it seems that this is linked to emojis. You can try adding the following header at the top of the file:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Check also that you are running Python3, and not Python 2.

[maxbrandes]

Thanks a lot. It now works like a charm!