Question

I’ve been writing a simple program, and I’ve designed a simple text abstraction – location on the screen X/Y, size of the box X/Y, the text within, and alignment.

But now I have this abstraction which is just a bunch of getters and setters. Normally I would just make this stuff public data members, but the trouble is that I can’t just chuck in data members, because in the future, there is an alternative code path in which they don’t exist in my code, but in an external library. Now I have a horrendously clunky interface of get/set (improved somewhat by a method chain). What can I do to make it cleaner?

Edit: My class definition.

class Text {
public:
    enum TextLayout {
        TopLeft,
        TopRight,
        BottomLeft,
        BottomRight,
        Center
    };
    // Text
    virtual string GetText() = 0;
    virtual Text* SetText(const string& ref) = 0;
    virtual Text* SetText(string&& ref) = 0;

    // Position
    virtual int GetPositionX() = 0;
    virtual Text* SetPositionX(int x) = 0;
    virtual int GetPositionY() = 0;
    virtual Text* SetPositionY(int y) = 0;
    virtual int GetSizeX() = 0;
    virtual Text* SetSizeX(int sizex) = 0;
    virtual int GetSizeY() = 0;
    virtual Text* SetSizeY(int sizey) = 0;
    virtual TextLayout GetTextLayout() = 0;
    virtual Text* SetTextLayout(TextLayout layout) = 0;

    virtual std::shared_ptr<Font> GetFont() = 0;
    virtual Text* SetFont(const std::shared_ptr<Font>&) = 0;
    virtual Text* SetFont(std::shared_ptr<Font>&&) = 0;

    virtual Text* SetColour(unsigned int colour) = 0;
    virtual unsigned int GetColour() = 0;

    virtual Render* GetRender() = 0;

    virtual ~Text();
};

Answer 1

You should encapsulate each concept precisely. cf. Single Responsibility Principle

I think:
There should be a class Position, and your class have a position member.
There should be a class Size, and your class have a size member.
Then you have 4 functions less. And a cleaner encapsulation.

EDIT: removed my comment about passing arguments by references instead of return by copy