In this paper, we study the cooperative output regulation problem for heterogeneous linearmulti-agent systems by a distributed feedforward approach. In comparison with existing results for similar problems, a novel distributed dynamic compensator is proposed, which does not need to exchange its state information among the communication network. Thus, it reduces the communication burden and facilitates the implementation of the controller. It is first shown that the problem can be solved by the proposed distributed feedforward controller, where the control gain is designed subject to a small-gain condition. Then, inspired by the small-gain condition and assuming that the exogeneous signal does not diverge exponentially, we further propose a low-gain method to the control gain design and show that the cooperative output regulation problem can be solved by the proposed low-gain distributed controller.