I am using DraftSight the free CAD software from Dassault Systems. I have set up my print configuration the way I need them to be for my existing .dwg files. I would like to apply my new print configuration 'Portrait' as my default print configuration. As far as I can see there is no way to change the default print configuration. Can anyone explain how to do this?
I had trouble with this too. The documentation is quite poor but, there is an informative video here.
The print configuration defines the paper size, scale, what to print, etc. The defaults are apparently set for inch units, so if you are using mm you get a ridiculously small paper size. As you have found, you need to apply a custom print configuration to get it to display and print nicely.
It's quite easy to do this on the fly, but it's tricky to get it to work automatically. I managed to do it using the method below.
First define your custom print configuration. Open the Print Configuration Manager from the File menu or by right-clicking a sheet tab. Set up your printer name, paper size and a scale of 1:1. You can put mm next to the scale, but I don't think it makes any difference. In the config manager it's a good idea to set 'Show dialog box on creation of new sheets'. This means that every time you create a new sheet it will ask you what print configuration to use. This avoids getting the silly defaults each time.
You can now automate the process so DraftSight applies your custom print configuration automatically. Do this using the 'Assign to...' button in the config manager. This sets up a mapping between the name of the sheet and the print config. If you assign your custom print config to the default sheet names 'Sheet1', Sheet2', etc your custom configuration will be applied by default every time there is a sheet of that name.