HAHA, you though I had given up like so many before, BUT NAY, NAY I SAY!!!
So yeah, packed this thing away for a while, then picked it up again, and I am actively developing it. Redid the whole thing from scratch, vanilla DF Curses as a place holder for glyphs not yet completed. I am trying a different strategy this time: make a more-or-less vanilla tileset, with
few tricks and such, then improve by iteration (also gives me time to completely research every trick in previous tilesets to give credit where it is due).
Kept the feel of the first while giving it a cohesive look and style, plus some carefully varied stroke sizes to make slim letters fill more space, thus dealing with the readability issue to some degree. It is a real treat to read text in, believe me.
This time around, all pictographic symbols are rendered from the strict "top down" perspective, as that is what the interface is driving at. This also more or less solves the barrels/percent sign/meals issue, though you need some imagination to see this glyph as a plate with food on it...
I have developed one cool trick with trees that I haven't seen yet, but is still in testing and needs a raw mod to support it. Teaser info is that through a cunning combination of top-down perspective, the tried-and-true blackout silhouettes, colored pixels in the tileset, and raw modification, trees actually
look good and
make sense visually.* To the point where you don't quite notice the tops of the trees are the same as a block pile...
But I digress:
Screenies later.
*And spatially, depending on what geometry for the DF world you ascribe to. If one is conceptualizing the world as most table-top RPGs do, then a grid square is 2m x 2m x 2m, which could hold a whole tree if it takes up two cubes stacked atop one another, one bed, as well as so many earrings it might as well be infinite. My solution assumes this (attempts not to start a dwarfometry flame war).
LordZorintrhox screams: "I need Magenta Pixels!"