disable html escaping - not working ?

[mri]

Hi,

I'm new to Velocity templates. I was asked to look into some rendering issues when moving to Confluence 7.13.

We have a number of User Macros in place for various reasons, mostly to produce pretty HTML which needs to be displayed as such in Confluence. But instead of getting the rendered HTML, the literal HTML code is displayed to the user like below fragment:  

Attribute Information for <span style="color: #606060;" class="s ...

I tried working around this by renaming variables using a "Html" postfix but that doesn't  (always) work.

My question is about using #disable_html_escaping(). When I add 

#disable_html_escaping()

to the .vm file, it's not interpreted. It just appears in the output as well:

Attribute Information for #disable_html_escaping() <span style="color: #606060;" class=" 

Would anyone know why that would happen?