The behavior of font resizing has changed in the last release of nautilus, and
should work better.
Could you try the last release of nautilus and see if the bug is fixed ?

ok, i just recompile CVS HEAD, the problem is there, and it was introduced with
the removal of bonobo. Attached are two screenshots showing part of my desktop
(75% zoom level, and label readable) and a windows in icon mode (75% zoom level,
which is my default, the labels are hardly readable)

Created attachment 34643 [details]
screenshot showing the icons in the desktop at 75% zoom level

Created attachment 34644 [details]
75% zoom level also, as you can see the labels are unreadble

As it appears, nautilus does not care about the zoom level when drawing label on
the desktop (the font size is fixed), but it does care in windows (the font size
moves with the zoom level). This is somehow inconsistent, I am marking this as new. 

*** Bug 167732 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

IMO it is a real shame that it is not possible to resize icons in nautilus
without also resizing the text label. My icons are far too big, but if I resize
them to 50% (ideal), the text becomes too small to read.

Naturally I don't want to change my application font setting gnome-wide so I
have to put up with 100% icons.

Anyone agrees with me?

me, I just installed nautilus 2.10 and noticed this problem (that I hadn't with
gnome 2.4, 2.6 and 2.8).

*** Bug 170118 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 170123 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I have the same problem and I agree. Icon zoom is completely useless if it makes
the text labels unreadable.

"me too". Another screenshot and more explanation of the problem, on the bug
#170847.

An example: on my VAIO I use font size 8 for my desktop fonts. The screen is
big, but the resolution is only XGA, and I need more space in the gnome-panel.
That's why I have set the font size to 8 (I have a pretty good vision, despite
wearing glasses occasionally for reasons not related to myopia). So, if I am to
go to 75% zoom on this VAIO laptop (which I want to do, because I want to save
real screen estate), the font will go down 6 points, which indeed is unreadable.
There is a misalignement between the font and the icon: the icon is fully usable
at 75% zoom,  but it's font isn't.

I think the solution here is to never go below 8 points, no matter the user's
zoom settings. This way, you don't risk the fonts becoming unreadable. 8pt is a
good minimum size, at least for the western languages.

The font shouldn't be changed at all if the default zoom is changed from 100% to
75%. The default zoom level should use the default font size, like the previous
GNOME versions did.

Manual zoom in a directory is another thing, but the default zoom level should
use the default font size. Otherwise it is impossible for the user to set a
prefered icon size and font size since the same font size is used in
applications too.

*** Bug 170206 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I think the relevant change was: 

2004-11-09  Alexander Larsson  <alexl@redhat.com>

...
        * libnautilus-private/nautilus-view.[ch]:
        Redo the zooming interface

        * src/file-manager/fm-directory-view.[ch]:
        * src/file-manager/fm-icon-view.c:
        * src/file-manager/fm-list-view.c:
        Implement the new interface for zooming and clean up.
        Remove the "default zoom affects fonts" behaviour.

        * src/nautilus-navigation-window.c:
        * src/nautilus-zoom-control.[ch]:
        Use the new simplified zoom interfaces

*** Bug 170847 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 171607 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Created attachment 45090 [details] [review]
Proposed patch

Font sizes are calculated for each zoom level. For the 75% level, I think that
the factor -2 is too high, I decreased this value to -1. Now the text are
readable once again.

Enjoy

but why should they change at all?

ubuntu bugzilla bug about this: https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/10046

This change also makes icon and list views behave inconsistently. The default
zoom level of 100% of the icon view gives the same font size as the default zoom
level of 50% in the list view.

Secondly:
Start in icon view with the default zoom level of 100% for the icon view and 50%
for the list view. Change to the list view and then change the default zoom
level for the list view to 25%. This makes the font smaller, but still readable
and not as small as when the icon view default zoom level is changed from 100%
to 75%.

But if you BEFORE you change to the list view from the icon view (with still
100% and 50% default zoom levels) set the default list view zoom level to 25%
and then change to the list view ONLY the icons change the size and not the
text, exactly like the old gnome behavior! This however doesn't work the other
way around.

This is highly inconsistent and my suggestion is that it should be changed to
either of the following:

1. Revert to the old behavior when the font always stayed the same size as the
choosen application font despite default zoom level (as I said earlier the zoom
in / zoom out in the View menu could change the font size, but the default zoom
level should indicate that that level should use the default application font size).

2. Add a new font setting to the font preferences: File viewer font. And this
size should always be used by the default zoom level settings in nautilus.

Otherwise there is NO way setting the default font size in nautilus for a user
that, for example, uses 75% default zoom level because he/she wants smaller
icons. And I always did that before, but now I have to live with icon view with
100% default zoom level with too large icons (in my taste), otherwise I can't
read the file names.

*** Bug 304145 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

A thread on this behaviour has been stared on the gentoo forums, there is also a
patch that reverts nautilus to the old behavior:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-336995.html

Yeah, I wanted to post this as well, as it is my ebuild and patch...
Additionally thanx to Olivier Fock-Ping for his attachment... All X in
x*PANGO_SCALE are simply set to zero... On the gentoo page, you find the ebuild
for gentoo, if you like...

I made some changes to the font sizes for the icon view that I think makes
zooming in the icon view make more sense and be more useful:

1) We never ever make fonts larger than the default font. You should be able to
read this, so using a larger font doesn't help. (However, more information is
added the the label, so it still gets "larger").
2) For 75% we use the same font size as 100% (but it has less info, so the size
of the label is smaller). This fixes the bug reports "hard to read" issue imho.
3) for 50% we use a 2 point smaller font than 100%. This allows us to actually
show more icons in the window and makes zoom useful. Its unlikely that anyone
would use this as the default zoom level anyway.

For the desktop i'm still not completely sure. The thing is that the desktop has
a custom font setting where you set both font and font size. Not always using
this size means the preference shows a value that not used. On the other hand,
not changing size depending on zoom makes things inconsistant. I'm leaving it as
it is, which means we always use the exact size specified in the pref. With the
current code this only makes a difference if your default icon zoom is <= 50%
anyway, so it probably doesn't matter much.

Thank you Alexander, this change is much appreciated :-)

Is this going to be available in the next GNOME 2.10 version or only for 2.12?

*** Bug 312199 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***