Colspan not being honored when rendering PDF

Similar to https://pd4ml.com/forums/topic/how-to-put-a-colspan-of-td-tag-in-table/, https://pd4ml.com/forums/topic/colspan-rowspan-not-rendering/ and https://pd4ml.com/forums/topic/is-it-work-html-td-colspan-attribute-in-pd4ml/, I cannot get the colspan attribute to be honored in a rendered PDF. I tried with the simple case as given in one of those threads and got the exact same result as the orignal poster did.

<table>
<tr>
<td class="blank" >data</td>
<td class="blank" >data</td>
<td class="blank" >data</td>
<td class="blank" >data</td>
<td class="blank" >data</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="blank" colspan="3"></td>
<td class="blank" colspan="2"></td>
</tr>
</table>

I am using PD4ml Volume 3.71b4, with the following settings:

Page dimensions: LETTER, PORTRAIT
Margins: 12px (all)
HTML Width: 1050
Author Name: Set
Smart Table Breaks: true
Image Split: false

Is this an issue arising from a setting? I have tried it on both Linux and windows systems with the same results both times.