Read an exported drawing
Rooms, walls and dimensions out of a DXF export — the plan as data rather than as a picture, so it can be checked, counted and compared.
File → Export → DXF, then the file is parsed.
Resources · In development
Chief Stephyn
A working companion for Chief Architect. It reads a plan — the rooms, the walls, the catalog, the manual — and answers questions about it outside the program, where the answers are easier to see.
What it does not do
It does not draw. Chief Architect has no way for an outside program to create geometry in a plan — no automation interface, and the scripting inside Chief can report on a plan but cannot build one. That is a limit of Chief, not of this tool, and no amount of work here changes it.
So everything below reads. Your plan is yours; nothing here modifies it.
Reading a plan you exported
The most reliable route, and the one that needs nothing installed beyond Chief itself. You export from Chief as you already would; the tools read what came out.
Find the plans on a drive
List the Chief .plan files in a project folder, so a job can be picked by name.
Reads the folder. Nothing is opened or changed.
Check the install
Report which Chief version is on the machine and which of these routes are actually available on it — the first thing to run when something does not work.
Looks at the install, reports what it finds.
Working inside Chief
A step closer to live: a small macro runs inside Chief and answers questions about the open plan. It is semi-manual by necessity — Chief decides when a macro runs, not us.
The scratchpad
A macro installed once into a plan. After that, a question can be sent to the open plan and the answer comes back without exporting anything.
A macro you paste in once, then re-evaluated by Chief.
Read the selected object
Whatever is selected in Chief right now, described in full — every property the object carries, including the ones no dialog shows you.
A live read-only bridge. Early, and it reads only; it never edits.
Dump a plan to a file
A Ruby snippet to paste into Chief's Ruby Console that writes the plan out as data, for when a plan is too large to answer piece by piece.
You paste it in and run it; the result is read back from disk.
The library
Detail families and wall types, kept in one place and installed into Chief's own User Catalog rather than living in a folder nobody can find.
What is in the catalog
Read Chief's real User Catalog — the families and blocks actually installed, not a list of what should be there.
Reads the catalog file Chief maintains.
Install a detail family
Put a registered detail family into the catalog, with a preview of what it is before it goes in.
Launches Chief's own import. Chief does the installing.
The manual, searchable
The Reference Manual, the tutorials and the knowledge base, asked in plain language.
Ask the manual
A question about how Chief does something, answered out of the documentation with the passage it came from — so the answer can be checked rather than believed.
Search over the ingested manuals. Cites what it used.
What it will cost, and when
$10 a month for the tool. Renders are separate at 50¢ a job — a job is one upload rendered into stills, about four pictures — in packs of 10 or 20, with five free to try. There is no way to buy it yet; the Render Studio is open now and takes the same Chief export, so it is the place to begin.