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[Atarlost]

I'm just going to randomly enumerate those I can think of in ASCII with a possible fix.  If anyone has any other annoying ambiguities please feel free to contribute.

• Blind Cave Ogres look like Tower Cap trunks and can appear on cavern levels with Tower Caps: change ogres to a subrace of giants with the G symbol
• Children with legendary skill from a mood look like legendary mechanics: make children flash burgundy and the color appropriate to their legendary skill
• single tile long raising drawbridges look the same whether up or down and look like fortifications: use a background color on drawbridges and invert their colors when raised
• Beak Dog pups are not distinct from Beak Dogs: make Beak Dogs bright red, I don't think anything else not procedurally generated uses 'B' anyways
• glass portals look like constructed or smooth walls when surrounded by natural rock or soil walls: use a single symbol for all doors
• floodgates of at least some materials look like doors and pending floodgates look like pending constructed up/down stairs: use one of the symbols freed up by consolidating doors for all floodgates
• the cursor looks like an up/down staircase (eg. sand for the keyboard controlled cursor and vomit covered anything for the mouse controlled cursor): make the cursor flash between two symbols

[Kiloku]

Some of these changes can easily be modded in!

Changing the [CREATURE_TILE:'O'] tag to [CREATURE_TILE:'G'] for the Blind Cave Ogre.
Changing the Beak dog's [COLOR:4:0:0] to [COLOR:4:0:1]
I'm pretty sure the symbol for the doors can be changed directly in the raws too, as well as floodgates.

Maybe a few of the other ideas are mod-able too, but I'm unsure.

[Atarlost]

Some of these changes can easily be modded in!

Changing the [CREATURE_TILE:'O'] tag to [CREATURE_TILE:'G'] for the Blind Cave Ogre.
Changing the Beak dog's [COLOR:4:0:0] to [COLOR:4:0:1]
I'm pretty sure the symbol for the doors can be changed directly in the raws too, as well as floodgates.

Maybe a few of the other ideas are mod-able too, but I'm unsure.

I'm quite certain that at least the bridges cannot be changed and there's no reason to not suggest fixing the base game just because some fixes could be modded. 

[Shonai_Dweller]

Some of these changes can easily be modded in!

Changing the [CREATURE_TILE:'O'] tag to [CREATURE_TILE:'G'] for the Blind Cave Ogre.
Changing the Beak dog's [COLOR:4:0:0] to [COLOR:4:0:1]
I'm pretty sure the symbol for the doors can be changed directly in the raws too, as well as floodgates.

Maybe a few of the other ideas are mod-able too, but I'm unsure.

I'm quite certain that at least the bridges cannot be changed and there's no reason to not suggest fixing the base game just because some fixes could be modded.

And since the next development arc after Villains is likely to see an expansion of the standard tileset, now is a very good time to suggest places where it can be improved.

[Kiloku]

I'm quite certain that at least the bridges cannot be changed and there's no reason to not suggest fixing the base game just because some fixes could be modded.

Absolutely, I was just giving some ideas on how to get at least a part of what you want now rather than later.

[Blastbeard]

Including symbols from other alphabets would greatly increase the the number of characters to work with. Cyrillic would be a good start, as it's distinct enough to prevent confusion in most cases but similar enough not to be too jarring.
On the other hand, if you never want to see the same symbol twice, the Japanese alphabet has over fifty thousand characters, although only about two thousand are in common use.

[Atarlost]

And since the next development arc after Villains is likely to see an expansion of the standard tileset, now is a very good time to suggest places where it can be improved.

If there's going to be a more comprehensive revamp I'll float the idea of switching to assigning creatures letters by some sort of taxonomy.  Eg. 'a'mphibians, 'A'nimal people, 'b'irds, 'B'ears, and so forth.  Breadth of category would obviously vary by how common it is with civilized races keeping individual symbols.  This would be more controversial I'm sure because people are used to the current symbols. 

[voliol]

Including symbols from other alphabets would greatly increase the the number of characters to work with. Cyrillic would be a good start, as it's distinct enough to prevent confusion in most cases but similar enough not to be too jarring.
On the other hand, if you never want to see the same symbol twice, the Japanese alphabet has over fifty thousand characters, although only about two thousand are in common use.

I think the Japanese alphabet (kanji) would be a bit overkill, especially since we have to consider that each character can have 15 different colors, ignoring background colors. Many of them I also believe would be too detailed to fit nicely in low-resolution tilesets.

Cyrillic I agree would be a good start, though, and as some kind of overkill might be needed, let me suggest something like the PxPlus fonts from The Oldschool PC Font Resource. With cyrillic, greek and hebrew, plus some extra technical symbols, I would say it is pretty conclusive. It also has the upside of including most roman letter variants, so if we ever get to mod the text it would be compatible with many translation mods.

Spoiler: Example picture (click to show/hide)

And since the next development arc after Villains is likely to see an expansion of the standard tileset, now is a very good time to suggest places where it can be improved.

If there's going to be a more comprehensive revamp I'll float the idea of switching to assigning creatures letters by some sort of taxonomy.  Eg. 'a'mphibians, 'A'nimal people, 'b'irds, 'B'ears, and so forth.  Breadth of category would obviously vary by how common it is with civilized races keeping individual symbols.  This would be more controversial I'm sure because people are used to the current symbols. 

I'm not sure how I feel about this. 'a'mphibians and 'b'irds both feel like too wide groups; you wouldn't want to confuse an ostrich for a raven. 'A'nimal people I suppose could work, but you would still have to check what kind they are each time. 'B'ears already use B, except for the 'P'anda.

[Atarlost]

I'm not sure how I feel about this. 'a'mphibians and 'b'irds both feel like too wide groups; you wouldn't want to confuse an ostrich for a raven. 'A'nimal people I suppose could work, but you would still have to check what kind they are each time. 'B'ears already use B, except for the 'P'anda.

There are still colors and I think a lot of the harmless non-domesticated birds are vermin.  For your specific worry, I haven't commonly seen non-domesticated flighted birds on the ground and if a flightless bird is in the sky it's just been flung by a bridge.  There's also at least one non-bear using 'B' for its symbol. 

[Egan_BW]

I must say that the idea of having everything in game represented by kanji and not reusing any characters appeals to my sense of efficiency.

[Blastbeard]

I must say that the idea of having everything in game represented by kanji and not reusing any characters appeals to my sense of efficiency.

Apparently that's a drop in the bucket compared to the full list of Chinese characters used by asian nations. Unihan supports some 80,000 characters, and unless I misunderstood the article, the problem with that is that it's still not enough. I can't find a definitive number on how many Chinese characters are currently in use overall, the estimates range between 50,000 and "unknowable". However, if we used that system, there would be enough characters to give every dwarf in the fortress their own personal symbol and still have room left over for just about anything else.

I think the Japanese alphabet (kanji) would be a bit overkill, especially since we have to consider that each character can have 15 different colors, ignoring background colors. Many of them I also believe would be too detailed to fit nicely in low-resolution tilesets.

Cyrillic I agree would be a good start, though, and as some kind of overkill might be needed, let me suggest something like the PxPlus fonts from The Oldschool PC Font Resource. With cyrillic, greek and hebrew, plus some extra technical symbols, I would say it is pretty conclusive. It also has the upside of including most roman letter variants, so if we ever get to mod the text it would be compatible with many translation mods.

Spoiler: Example picture (click to show/hide)

You say overkill like it's a bad thing, but you've got a point about the problem with details and resolution. The differences between chinese characters and anything derived form them can get pretty subtle in some cases, and if they can't be displayed properly we're back at square one of the "What am I looking at" issue. I was going to mention arabic, but you run into the same issues there.

I didn't know that the runic alphabet and old italic were in unicode, but that's been fixed. I think those two scripts would fit in nicely with DF's overall theme, so if we had a way of tacking those onto PxPlus, that might just be all we need.

[voliol]

I think the Japanese alphabet (kanji) would be a bit overkill, especially since we have to consider that each character can have 15 different colors, ignoring background colors. Many of them I also believe would be too detailed to fit nicely in low-resolution tilesets.

Cyrillic I agree would be a good start, though, and as some kind of overkill might be needed, let me suggest something like the PxPlus fonts from The Oldschool PC Font Resource. With cyrillic, greek and hebrew, plus some extra technical symbols, I would say it is pretty conclusive. It also has the upside of including most roman letter variants, so if we ever get to mod the text it would be compatible with many translation mods.

Spoiler: Example picture (click to show/hide)

You say overkill like it's a bad thing, but you've got a point about the problem with details and resolution. The differences between chinese characters and anything derived form them can get pretty subtle in some cases, and if they can't be displayed properly we're back at square one of the "What am I looking at" issue. I was going to mention arabic, but you run into the same issues there.

I didn't know that the runic alphabet and old italic were in unicode, but that's been fixed. I think those two scripts would fit in nicely with DF's overall theme, so if we had a way of tacking those onto PxPlus, that might just be all we need.

Overkill is mostly bad for the who get tileset artists, who get more glyphs to work with. Still, detail was my main point, and I'm very much up for trying a full chinese character full support graphics pack whenever the steam update comes (or if it is possible now with TWBT), just to see how parsable it would be.

Brogue I remembered using some strange characters, among them old Italic/archaic Greek Koppa(Ϙ), but when I looked it up (i.e. opened up my Brogue folder) those characters turned out to be downsized and thus fuzzy versions of a high-quality font, instead of being made pixel-by-pixel. I get the feeling these alphabets (the runic and old italic) might not have pixelated versions yet.
Nonetheless, some 50 new characters in the standard DF tileset style should be able to be procured with help of the tileset-making community. Now that Kitfox are part of the equation, getting help from the community on things like this should also be less risky.

[Dorsidwarf]

 I think the PXplus example is a great extension of the existing tileset which opens up a lot more wiggle room to avoid confusions

[TheBeardyMan]

I think the Japanese alphabet (kanji) would be a bit overkill, especially since we have to consider that each character can have 15 different colors, ignoring background colors. Many of them I also believe would be too detailed to fit nicely in low-resolution tilesets.

There are still colors and I think a lot of the harmless non-domesticated birds are vermin.  For your specific worry, I haven't commonly seen non-domesticated flighted birds on the ground and if a flightless bird is in the sky it's just been flung by a bridge.  There's also at least one non-bear using 'B' for its symbol. 

But remember, color isn't always owned by the item type - there are many items for which color is owned by the material. So color isn't a universal solution for fixing ambiguous graphics.

[Atarlost]

I think the Japanese alphabet (kanji) would be a bit overkill, especially since we have to consider that each character can have 15 different colors, ignoring background colors. Many of them I also believe would be too detailed to fit nicely in low-resolution tilesets.

There are still colors and I think a lot of the harmless non-domesticated birds are vermin.  For your specific worry, I haven't commonly seen non-domesticated flighted birds on the ground and if a flightless bird is in the sky it's just been flung by a bridge.  There's also at least one non-bear using 'B' for its symbol. 

But remember, color isn't always owned by the item type - there are many items for which color is owned by the material. So color isn't a universal solution for fixing ambiguous graphics.

The issue being addressed here isn't items, it's creatures.  Color is always owned by creature type for adult creatures that don't have professions or war training.  Child animals appear in company with adults when wild and can thus be identified by context.  War animals are mostly similar enough that confusion can probably be afforded unless the giant variants are large enough to flatten armored dwarfs.