Roll-to-roll patterning of small-scale features on a rapidly moving web is an industrially important process with a wide array of commercial applications both old and new. Examples include magazine printing and more recently the pattering of flexible electronics. Among the many existing web coating techniques for large-scale fabrication, slit die and gravure coating are the most commonly used. In gravure coating, an engraved roller with a regular array of shallow cavities/cells is used to pick up fluid from a bath. It is then passed through a flexible doctoring blade in order to meter off excess fluid before printing the fluid onto a flexible substrate. Here we present an experimental investigation into the effect that viscoelasticity has on the dynamics of liquid transfer from an idealized gravure cell to a flat rigid substrate. Although the dynamics of the actual gravure coating process is quite complex, we chose to study a simplified process by imposing an extensional flow using a modified filament stretching rheometer in which one of the endplates is replaced by a cell containing a single truncated conical gravure cell. The deformation and stretching of the resulting liquid bridges, the motion of the contact line within the gravure cell and the total amount of fluid removed from the gravure cell are studied as a function of the imposed stretch rate, the fluid rheology, and the geometry of the gravure cell. Two different viscoelastic solutions of high molecular weight polyethylene oxide in water were studied and compared to a series of Newtonian fluids. The results show that the primary impact of viscoelasticity is the addition of an elastic stress which increases the tension along the liquid bridge and significantly increases the bridge lifetime. For stretches where the gravure cell was placed on the bottom and the top plate moved vertically, viscoelasticity was found to significantly reduce the amount of fluid transferred to the top plate. However, by placing the gravure cell on top and reversing the relative direction of the inertial and gravitational stresses, viscoelasticity was found to significantly increase the amount of fluid transferred. Increasing the stretch rate was found to amplify these observations. Finally, increasing the contact angle between the fluid and the gravure cell and decreasing the aspect ratio of the gravure cell were both found to increase the amount of fluid transferred. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.