@SemP I have the exact same issue. Still looking for an answer. I tried using ‘file://‘ in my html href on PDFs, but it tries to open the PDF in a text editor.
Older versions of Assistant had a PDF tab in preferences with a default PDF viewer configurable field, but not in this one…
Still looking for a solution… I might start an http server and use http://localhost/pdffile.pdf because it will open http links in a web browser.