Many applications work with data that cannot be translated into a standard clipboard format without loss of information. These applications can create their own clipboard formats. A clipboard format that is used by an application, as opposed to a standard clipboard format, is called a registered clipboard format. For example, if a word-processing application copied formatted text to the clipboard using a standard text format, the formatting information would be lost. The solution would be to register a new clipboard format, such as Rich Text Format (RTF).
To register a new clipboard format, use the RegisterClipboardFormat function. This function takes the name of the format and returns and unsigned integer value that represents the registered clipboard format. To retrieve the name of the registered clipboard format, pass the unsigned integer value to the GetClipboardFormatName function.
If more than one application registers a clipboard format with exactly the same name, the clipboard format is registered only once. Both calls to the RegisterClipboardFormat function return the same value. In this way, two different applications can share data by using a registered clipboard format.
For a list of standard clipboard formats, see the SetClipboardData function.