The nearby Chamaeleon clouds have been observed in gamma rays by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) and in thermal dust emission by Planck and IRAS. Cosmic rays and large dust grains, if smoothly mixed with gas, can jointly serve with the Hi and (CO)-C-12 radio data to (i) map the hydrogen column densities, N-H, in the different gas phases, in particular at the dark neutral medium (DNM) transition between the H I-bright and CO-bright media; (ii) constrain the CO-to-H-2 conversion factor, X-CO; and (iii) probe the dust properties per gas nucleon in each phase and map their spatial variations across the clouds. We have separated clouds at local, intermediate, and Galactic velocities in H i and (1)2CO line emission to model in parallel the gamma-ray intensity recorded between 0.4 and 100 GeV; the dust optical depth at 353 GHz, tau(353); the thermal radiance of the large grains; and an estimate of the dust extinction, A(VQ), empirically corrected for the starlight intensity. The dust and gamma-models have been coupled to account for the DNM gas. The consistent gamma-emissivity spectra recorded in the different phases confirm that the GeV-TeV cosmic rays probed by the LAT uniformly permeate all gas phases up to the (CO)-C-12 cores. The dust and cosmic rays both reveal large amounts of DNM gas, with comparable spatial distributions and twice as much mass as in the CO-bright clouds. We give constraints on the H I-DNM-CO transitions for five separate clouds. CO-dark H-2 dominates the molecular columns up to A(V) similar or equal to 0.9 and its mass often exceeds the one-third of the molecular mass expected by theory. The corrected A(VQ) extinction largely provides the best fit to the total gas traced by the gamma rays. Nevertheless, we find evidence for a marked rise in A(VQ)/N-H with increasing N-H and molecular fraction, and with decreasing dust temperature. The rise in tau(353)/N-H is even steeper. We observe variations of lesser amplitude and orderliness for the specific power of the grains, except for a coherent decline by half in the CO cores. This combined information suggests grain evolution. We provide average values for the dust properties per gas nucleon in the different phases. The gamma rays and dust radiance yield consistent X-CO estimates near 0.7 x 10(20) cm(-2) K-1 km(-1) s. The A(VQ) and tau(353) tracers yield biased values because of the large rise in grain opacity in the CO clouds. These results clarify a recurrent disparity in the gamma-versus dust calibration of X-CO, but they confirm the factor of 2 difference found between the X-CO estimates in nearby clouds and in the neighbouring spiral arms.
