Thanks for the typo catches, I'll be fixing those.
I know it's probably hidden somewhere, but how do you make shovels? I can't find anything in the carpenter's workshop.
As Wyrm said, they're strictly metal. It's recommended to embark with them, and likely more than the 2 default. Once caravans come, you can trade for cheap copper shovels and the like if you aren't able to find ore yourself.
As for gravel, or some stone in the soil layer, I think I've toyed with the idea of it, but never expanded on it. I may test out something like that. Clay, as I recall, was also useable as a stone in many regards, but I don't recall the implications of that. I'll give it a try though. The idea was to make stone an ultimately valuable resource, not to have it completely devoid of existence nor swimming in it as dwarven forts often are. So this may work with a bit of tweaking.
As for putting copper/gold/etc in the soil, I know I've been able to do it before, but it doesn't appear to be working now with just having them take the soil template. I also tried using the [ENVIRONMENT:SOIL:VEIN:100] or similar tokens with no luck. I'll see if I stumble on something while mining out the soil.
In the meanwhile, I've readded [UNDIGGABLE] to the individual entries. While the other way, putting undiggable on the stone template, was overall nice and clean, it also made gems undiggable, which I'd like not to be the case, especially not if copper/gold is diggable. Also, I did like having a couple types of stone (chert comes to mind) as being diggable, as it's been mentioned that some types of rocks are easily broken up. My geology is lacking, though.