For the adoption of roll-to-roll printing method to the printed electronics, it is mandatory to increase the resolution of register control Therefore, it is desired to derive a mathematical model for register and to develop a controller to reduce the register error. The cross direction register error was derived considering both the lateral motion of a moving web and the transverse position of a printing roll And a feedforward control method was proposed to cancel out the disturbance of CD register from upstream span The proposed controller could be used to improve the performance of the CD register controller in a large area roll-to-roll printing machine The mathematical modeling and proposed control method were validated by numerical simulations and experimental verifications in various operating conditions using a multilayer direct gravure printing machine These results show that the proposed feedforward control scheme greatly improves the control performance of register control in overcoming the upstream disturbances (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved