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(Apologies if this is a duplicate; I didn't see my question among the many overfull \hbox questions already asked.)

My TeX file had been typsetting without any problems for a few days, when suddenly it started to complain of an overfull \hbox at a line that I had not modified since the previous compile. (The output still looks fine to me, for the record.)

The line that causes the problems is

More precisely, let $\P^N$ denote the space of all quadrics in a projective space $\P^n$ (so $N= {n+2 \choose 2}-1$.)

and the warning message is

ERROR: ** Overfull \hbox (1.12373pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 164--164

--- TeX said ---

(amsmath) on input line 53.

--- HELP ---

Because it couldn't find a good place for a line break, TeX put more on this line than it should.

Can anyone diagnose this problem?

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Welcome to TeX.sx! The "Overfull \hbox message is not an error, but only a warning; the error is due to \choose; with amsmath there's the better \binom{n+2}{2} instead of {n+2\choose 2}. – egreg Feb 14 at 21:06
Thanks for your help! (I plumped for "error" rather than "warning" because the message I got said "error".) I understand that \choose is sub-optimal, but what I'm really curious about is why such a warning should suddenly appear when LaTeX was compiling the line perfectly happily before. (And, for full disclosure, I felt too lazy to change all the \choose commands to \binom commands.) – Artie Feb 14 at 21:13
Those messages are probably from your front-end to LaTeX, the style is different. Overfull lines depend on many factors; it's possible that you have modified the paragraph. – egreg Feb 14 at 21:55
Changing fonts can make lines longer/shorter too. Or a change in style moves the margins. – vonbrand Feb 15 at 2:19

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