In a gravure printing press with multi-units, tension fluctuations by an upstream register control often cause register errors in downstream units and the settling time of the downstream register error is longer than that of the upstream one. For this reason, it is needed to introduce a new control system to shorten the total settling time. This paper presents a cooperative register control method using feedforward signals. First, a mathematical model of the gravure printing press, called compensator roll type, is proposed and a good match between the experimental and the calculated results is verified. Then, using this mathematical model the cooperative controller is designed by computer simulation and compared with the conventional method. Finally, some experimental results are demonstrated to show the validity of the proposed mathematical model and to verify the reduction of the defect caused by the downstream register errors.