How do you know the height?
Somehow, if you spawn your adventurer in your fort and then use dwarf therapist, you'll be able to connect it while playing adventure mode.
That works, thanks. As long as you don't close the game after retiring your fortress you can use the Therapist to take a look at adventurers spawned at the location.
I have tested it a bit, noticed something a bit weird, or maybe I'm not fully understanding it.
So, I made a human fortress in fortress mode, just to "be sure that I get adventurers being able to one-hand wield two-hand weapons". Then I retired that fortress and created a (human) adventurer there. I'd get people of up to ~83'000cm³ - but they'd not wield a two-hand sword in one hand. Then I got a human who's description says "He has incredible muscles stretched over a broad body." while only having a size of 69'980cm³ and he wields the two-hand sword in one hand when he has both hands free. (I tried getting a dwarf able to wield a two-handed sword one handed, but I guess that requires both a "tall" and "broad" body. So far I only saw "tall" after dozens of adventurers. Just interested in whether that'd even be possible...)
Of course it can be lots of FUN to use whatever is available as a weapon, that's why I ran around wielding the mighty cave blob corpses for a few hundred squishy goblin-kills. Who needs a shield when you can dodge? ... just don't try to beat bogeyman with that.
Yes, finding steel weapons or armor is almost impossible. I remember finding a full set of steel armor with a dwarf in an almost completly evil pocket-sized world in v0.34 ... increased his chances of survival by quite a lot! I wish it was a bit more available actually, just as overall armor should be more used by enemis in adventure mode. At some point you just slaughter through hordes of goblins, especially if you already became a "necromancer-vampire axe lord dwarf" or such ... then again, making it to that point, especially if you enjoy FUN a lot, is another story.