**6.6 Printing**

Polymeric thin films might be manufactured using novel technologies such as 3D printing. It might be a platform for developing the dose form that is most useful to the specific patient. Because of their versatility and cost-effectiveness, printing technologies are becoming increasingly popular. Printing technologies are extensively used in the pharmaceutical sector for identifying or labelling pharmaceutical dosage forms, especially to make the product more easily identifiable and to prevent counterfeit manufacture. However, this method has just lately been used to load drugs into medicinal dosage forms. The use of off-the-shelf consumer inkjet printers with drug-loaded inks to produce precisely dosed units of medicinal components is one example. Additionally, a hybrid of inkjet and flexographic technologies has been employed. Inkjet printing was utilised to print API on various substrates, while flexographic printing was used to cover the drug-loaded substrate with a thin polymeric coating [2].

In the all adopted method of preparation for thin films listed above like solvent evaporation, semisolid casting, hot-melt extrusion, solid dispersion extrusion, rolling and printing, the solvent evaporation method is more recommendable and mostly used. Evaporative systems provide passive and non-occlusive delivery of drugs. Therefore, this system is well tolerated and also demonstrates very low skin irritation rates. Compared to physical technologies they are having a simple working mechanism and more importantly they provide non-invasive drug delivery. Apart from that solvent evaporation method is more economical, reproducible and more efficient.
