Contibution thank you letters do not produce vertical tables correclty

I have put this down as CiviContribute bug, but it could actually be that only the documentation needs updating to match the changes introduced by  https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-19176. However, I tried consturcting tables from scatch using the various different separators and I couldn't get the information into a vertical table other than as indicated here.

When producing an annual tax receipt/thankyou for regular donors I found it impossible to get contribution dates to appear in a vertical table using the code in the user guide (https://docs.civicrm.org/user/en/latest/contributions/manual-receipts-and-thank-yous/) or otherwise, unless I also included the token {contribution.receive_date} again somewhere else in the document body.

Ie group by contact with separator line break and using

<table class="table" style="width: 500px;" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" align="left">
  <tbody>
     <tr>
       <th>Date</th>
      <th>Amount</th>
      <th>Receipt Number</th>
    </tr>
<!-- {foreach from=$contributions item=contribution} {assign var="date" value=$contribution.receive_date|date_format:"%d %B %Y"} -->
     <tr>
       <td>{$date}</td>
       <td>{$contribution.total_amount}</td>
        <td>{$contribution.id}</td>
     </tr>
<!-- {/foreach} -->
   </tbody>
</table>

results in a vertical  table with the Date colum blank but info in the Amount and Receipt Number columns.  To get date in the date column I needed to randomly add {contribution.receive_date} to the letter (And as I couldn't get that to print in white I had to push it onto another page and discard every second page produced.)