On second thought (I have been thinking about this a bit), I think this would be absolutely fine to me. Krita is not supposed to be a layouting tool and for text bubbles in comics this would work fine.
Well, maybe a bit of intimidating and just having a tool that is more focused. And I guess I just wanted to say that while I might have a lot of ideas, just having a text tool that works in the canvas and gives me the most important text-formatting tools, is already an amazing thing!
Good question. But maybe let me define some use cases.
Use case 1, artistic type
This could for example be the main typography on an album cover, probably the type would go a bit beyond just plain type. I might use gradients, masks, shadows. Maybe use the type as a mask for a paint layer. This would not be a lot of text, maybe even a few words. Likely I would not use a box, since each line of text would probably be a separate element, maybe even a separate layer.
Use case 2, quick placeholder text
This would probably involve bigger type (headlines) and body text. I often do this when creating an illustration that will have to partially serve as a background for text. Since the text here is just a placeholder, I generally don’t spent much time styling it. I just define the font size, colour and place the text roughly where it should be.
Use case 3: text in speech bubbles
In this case the font is fixed, most of the time even the font size. Each paragraph would be a separate element. Some words would need to be bold of emphasized. I generally keep type very simple and readable. If I do all-caps text (something I don’t do as often anymore) I am grateful for a feature that quickly lets me transform a sentence-case text in an uppercase one.
Use case 4: onomatopoeia in comics.
I just realized that could be another nice use case. Here colour, size, rotation and potentially warp effects would be really great.
There’s probably more use cases, but these are the ones I can think of from the top of my head.
One thing that emerges here is that it’s mostly about short text, even single words. The settings I would probably use most are size, colour, spacing (kerning) and generally what is found under “character” in other software packages. Paragraph settings would be of secondary importance. Although text alignment and line spacing are probably the ones I would use most.
The ones I would love to have easily reachable are probably: font, font style (italic, bold, black), size, kerning, colour, text alignment and line spacing.
For big text I would probably use Open Type features a lot.
I think styles would get used only rarely, now that I really go through what I usually did with text in Photoshop.
And to actually answer your question, I would be ok with having separate tabs for character, paragraph and styles.
I think this would work for me yes.