HMM files are kept in a compact binary format. This format is not meant to be human readable. There are two circumstances in which you might want to read this file. One is that the binary files are not necessarily portable from machine to machine (because of byte-ordering issues) -- so you may need to convert the files to an ASCII format in order to make them portable. The second is if you wanted to write programs or scripts to manipulate HMM files and do something that the software doesn't do for you.
hmm-convert converts an HMM file to a ASCII format. The ASCII files contain some documentation to make it easier to tell what all the numbers mean (eventually, I'll document this format in this manual). For instance:
> hmm-convert globin2.hmm globin2.asc-hmm
This converts the HMM file globin2.hmm to the ASCII HMM file globin2.asc-hmm. The original binary file is left untouched.
To convert the other way (from ASCII back to compact binary), use the -b option to hmm-convert.