After the last release, the behavior of MathicsScanner changed, in a way that named characters in strings are mapped to unicode-equivalent instead of wl-code as before. After fighting with the formatter code in mathics-core, I think this behavior is wrong.
The reason is that the goal of having unicode-equivalent is to provide a readable output, not to have an efficient way to store characters.
The example comes up with "\[DifferentialD]". In 1.2.4, this string was parsed as "\u7f4c", which was a WL specific character, with a specific meaning. If the string has a form like "\[Integral]F[x]\[DifferentialD] x", the string can be parsed afterward as the expression
Integrate[F[x], x]. On the other hand, if we want to produce a printable version, \[DifferentialD]
could be converted into d, or \u0001D451 or \, d, according to the place we need it.
With the current behavior in master, the test/format/test_format.py tests in mathics-core fails.