Is there a way to change papersize in beamer?

Question

From what I have gathered on the interwebs, I found that beamer gives no basic options to change the papersize. I am however in desperate need of exactly that. Mind that I don't want to re-scale one or more frames to an A4, I want to actually change the size of every frame.

Is there any way to work around this?

edit:

@JosephWright The reason I need to change the paper size is because I need to end up with the different slides in PNG format. These png's have to be a certain size. I was planning on simply converting the pdf to png's like you could normally do with LaTeX, untill I found out the problem with resizing in beamer.

@ prettygully I have already looked at the beamerposter package, but it seems like beamerposter puts all the frames on one page, what would make the conversion to PNG's impossible

edit2:

@ Andrew Stacey Your answers solved my personal problem as I was unaware of aspect ratio and my own ratio happens to be incredibly close to 16/9. I will correct the dimensions during PNG conversion.

I am still interested if anyone can come up with a general answer to the question thought.

Answer 1

The class beamer uses the package geometry to setup the page dimension. The package geometry provides the command \geometry to set options in the preamble. So you can simple use:

\geometry{paper=a4}

Answer 2

After a lot of work with changing the paper size of Beamer presentations, I decided to post here and make my solution available to others.

The underlying problem is as follows: Beamer uses a standard paper size of 128x96mm, as that is more or less optimal for digital presentations. However, EDAS and other digital conference tools often check pdf files before a document upload for their paper size and they only permit certain standard formats. As of right now, they have no supported option for this - I have contacted their support and they do not seem eager to change this any time soon.

So to "rescale" an entire (already compiled) presentation you could do the following:

\documentclass[t]{beamer}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\geometry{papersize={11in,8.5in}}
\beamertemplatenavigationsymbolsempty
\setbeamercolor{background canvas}{bg=}
\begin{document}
  \includepdf[pages=-,fitpaper=true,noautoscale,width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{presentation.pdf}
\end{document}

Instead of 11:8.5 inches, you can choose whatever you wish. You just have to make sure that the ratio fits. The pdfpages package offers other options too that might enable a switch of format.

Kind regards Florian

Answer 3

You can use the blowup package:

\documentclass{beamer}

\usetheme{Warsaw}

\usepackage{blowup}
\blowUp{target=a4,landscape}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
    
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{title}
    \lipsum[1-5] 
\end{frame} 
    
\end{document}