Beamer for letter size paper

Question

My daughter is in high school and is working on a science project. She has really enjoyed writing the paper in LaTeX. Now, she has to make a tri-fold presentation of the major points. In the past, that has meant PowerPoint printed onto letter-size paper then pasting those pages (one slide per page) onto the board. How can we resize beamer to have at least the same aspect ratio as letter-size paper? Ideally, we would have the same dimensions, also, but that is not so important as we can scale at print time. I have used beamerposter in the past, but that generates just one page, I think. Any suggestions are appreciated. The default is to simply use beamer as-is and scale to as close to letter size as possible when printing.

Answer 1

The beamer class sets paper height using geometry, so while there isn't an interface to override the settings you can just force the issue after loading the class.

\documentclass{beamer}
\geometry{letterpaper,landscape}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
  Hello world
\end{frame}
\end{document}

If you want the aspect ratio without the full page size then you'll need to work out the papersize yourself. For example, the standard beamer settings have a paper height of 9.6 cm and width of 12.8 cm. Keeping say the width the same we might do

\documentclass{beamer}
\geometry{papersize={12.80cm,9.91cm}}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
  Hello world
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Here, as I've hard-coded the sizes I don't need the landscape key.